Irises
Irises in blue and green on a gold ground, repeated like a pattern. The motif alludes to a poem in The Tales of Ise.
The same clusters of flowers recur, probably made with stencils – pattern and nature at once.
Ogata Kōrin was born in Kyoto in 1658 into a wealthy family of textile merchants who supplied clothing to the court and the warrior aristocracy. He grew up surrounded by beautiful fabrics and patterns. When the family fortune dwindled, he took up painting as a profession. He was inspired by Tawaraya Sōtatsu and became one of the most important artists of the Rinpa tradition. Irises is dated to the early 18th century and belongs to the Nezu Museum in Tokyo, where it is designated a National Treasure. His younger brother Ogata Kenzan became a famous potter, and the brothers sometimes collaborated, with Kōrin painting decoration on Kenzan’s ceramics.
The work consists of two folding screens of six panels each. On a gold ground grow clusters of blue irises with green leaves. There are no other motifs – no ground, no water and no sky. The flowers form a rhythmic wave that runs across the screens, sometimes dense, sometimes sparser.
The composition recalls a textile pattern. Several groups of flowers are repeated almost identically. Examinations have shown that Kōrin probably used stencils to transfer the forms. In this way the forms of nature are united with the regularity of pattern, and Kōrin’s background in the textile world is evident.
The colours are few: blue, green and gold. The blue of the flowers is made from azurite and the green of the leaves from malachite, mineral pigments that give a deep, luminous colour. The gold leaf provides a radiant ground that changes with the light. Kōrin used neither shading nor perspective, which gives the screens a decorative, almost abstract character.
The motif alludes to an episode in The Tales of Ise, a Japanese collection of tales from the 10th century. A man comes to a place called Yatsuhashi, the Eight Bridges, where irises bloom in a marsh. He writes a poem about his longing for his wife, in which the syllables of the word for iris begin each line. Kōrin has removed both the man and the bridges. Only the flowers remain, and those who knew the story understood the allusion.
Kōrin also made another version with the bridges, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in which a zigzag bridge can be seen among the irises. It shows how he could vary the same motif.
Irises is shown at the Nezu Museum every spring, when irises are also in bloom in the museum’s garden. The screens have become a symbol of Japanese decorative art and have influenced both Japanese design and Western art. The Rinpa tradition has attracted renewed interest in modern times, and Kōrin’s style has become an ideal of simplified, elegant design.