Flowers and Grasses (mid-1600s): Art, History and Details

Flowers and Grasses (mid-1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Kitagawa Sōsetsu (Japanese, active 1639–50).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Kitagawa Sōsetsu painted for the Maeda family, powerful rulers of what is present-day Ishikawa Prefecture on the central northern coast of Honshū, Japan’s main island. Screens served as room dividers and backdrops in Maeda grand residences. This composition is considered one of the artist’s masterpieces. Kitagawa Sōsetsu is thought to have been a student of Tawaraya Sōsetsu, who was in turn the student of Tawaraya Sōtatsu, the Kyoto-based master painter regarded as the creator of the style that came to be known as Rinpa. By selecting a painter of this lineage, the Maeda family consciously connected their aesthetics to those of the imperial capital as a means of proclaiming their elevated status.

Object facts

• Title: Flowers and Grasses
• Date: mid-1600s
• Creator attribution: Kitagawa Sōsetsu (Japanese, active 1639–50)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 153.7 x 329.2 cm (60 1/2 x 129 5/8 in.); Including mounting: 170.2 x 348.4 cm (67 x 137 3/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1968.193.1

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• Stern, Harold P. Birds, Beasts, Blossoms, and Bugs: The Nature of Japan. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1976.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.