Flowers and Grasses
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.
Colors in this work
Details
- Date
- mid-1600s
- Dimensions
- image: height 1.537 m, width 3.292 m; including mounting: height 1.702 m, width 3.484 m; painting: height 1.541 m, width 3.3 m; overall framed: height 1.702 m, width 3.462 m; each panel: height 1.666 m, width 0.571 m
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Holding institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Palette
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Select a color to find related artworks.
- Image provider
- cleveland-museum-of-art
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Credit
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
Art Genome Taxonomy
10 tags
Subject Matter
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Flora Both · 99%
Flowers, grasses, leaves, and stems dominate the composition; the catalog title is Flowers and Grasses.
Visual Qualities
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Sparse Visual · 96%
Large botanical groupings are separated by extensive areas of relatively unpainted paper, producing pronounced open space across the screen.
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Asymmetrical Visual · 94%
The floral clusters are distributed unevenly across the panels, with substantial open areas and no centered or mirrored arrangement.
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Earth Tones Visual · 91%
The dominant palette consists of warm beige, muted green, brown, gray, black, white, and restrained red accents.
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Highly Detailed Visual · 93%
The image contains numerous finely rendered blossoms, leaves, stems, and small foliage details, especially within the concentrated floral passages.
Medium and Techniques
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Painting Both · 99%
The Cleveland Museum of Art classifies the work as a painting, and the image visibly shows painted botanical imagery.
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Screen Format Metadata · 99%
The medium is cataloged as a pair of six-fold screens, and the supplied image visibly presents a folding-panel format.
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Work on Paper Metadata · 99%
The catalog identifies the medium as ink and color on paper.
Time Periods
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17th Century Art Metadata · 99%
The museum dates the work to the mid-1600s, within the seventeenth century.
Geographic Regions
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Japanese Art Metadata · 99%
The place of origin is Japan, and the work is classified by the museum under Japanese Art.
Source & rights
Kitagawa Sōsetsu (Japanese, active 1639–50). Flowers and Grasses. Cleveland Museum of Art.
High-resolution sources
- Original TIFF ↗ 15,702 × 7,722 · Cleveland Museum Of Art · Available