Page 133 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

of the early eighteenth century. The hyperformalization of natural motifs became
closely associated with Kōrin’s name, even more so after he died, in 1716. A woman’s
summer robe from the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrates how

such “Kōrin motifs ” were utilized in textile design (cat. 57). Note, for example,
the extreme abbreviation of the sandbars, plovers, and flowering plants in the
garment’s lower section. The plovers are hollow oblong dots with twiglike feet;

the chrysanthemum blossoms consist of circular outlines with large dots for
centers; and the paulownia trees are suggested by their distinctive tripartite
leaves sans trunks.
Images of geese bring us full circle in our understanding of how birds were
transformed by artists working under the sway of the Rinpa aesthetic. In tradi-

tional Japanese poetry, geese are associated with both autumn and the end of the
year, as poets from ancient times on have observed the “first wild geese” (hatsukari)
flying south in autumn for the winter months and then returning north in the

spring. A luxurious inrō by lacquer artisan Yamada Jōkasai (1811 – 1879), embel-
lished in gold and silver maki-e with inlaid mother-of-pearl, betrays all of the
character istics identified thus far as belonging to the Rinpa sensibility (cat. 58).
Interestingly, although credit for the image has historically been given to the
Kano school artist Seisen’in (1796 – 1846), a preparatory drawing from Kōrin’s

own hand, executed a century earlier, survives in the Ogata family archives
(now in the Konishi Family collection), so that we may now trace both the
Kano painting and the nineteenth-century lacquerwork back to Kōrin’s fertile

visual imagination.

birds

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