User:Hillbillyholiday/Large Flowers

Large Flowers Hokusai ten horizontal ōban prints. untitled. small series vertical with poems. unsuccesful.

Produced 1833–34 when at the height of his career. Early 1830s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji Great Wave A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces.

the series has always been regarded as a masterpiece in the West, inspiring Monet (and other artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

animals as accessories to highlight features of the plant, treated similarly to his previous depictions of actors, courtesans

Close-up views. "iconographic revolution"

"Bird-and-flower pictures (which can be referred to as either kachō-e or kachō-ga) have a long tradition within the history of Japanese and, even earlier, in Chinese art, spanning media from painting to decorative arts."

1814 key book Hokusai's Album of Drawings from Life presages his later work (esp. the iris).

Description and analysis
Poppies—the Japanese word keshi refers both to the poppy and to karashi mustard, both of which the Japanese associated with China. Hokusai was heavily influnced by the Chinese painting manual Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, and appears to have used the book as reference when making this picture. The "mustard garden" refers to that of Shen Xinyou (沈心友) in Nanjing; karashi mustard first arrived in Japan from China during the Muromachi period (1336–1573).

Peonies and Butterfly—the peony symbolizes wealth and the butterfly long life. The picture is likely a homage to a traditional symbolic theme in Chinese painting, one that also includes a cat.

Monet/west
"What Monet admired most in this print was the interrelationship of all the formal elements of the composition and the manner in which they came to make up the subject as an example of la verite."

Prominently displayed Peonies and Butterfly in his salon. symbolizing his links to Japanese art

To Marc Elder in 1924 "look how powerful his work is. Look at this butterfly which is struggling agaist the wind, the flowers which are bending. And nothing useless. The very economy of life."

small series of four Chrysanthemums 1896-7 after a long break from painting still-lifes, may have been prompted by the Large Flower series which he was 'actively collecting at the time'. wrote Maurice Joyant in 1896 he had iris, chrys, peonies, convolvulus.

"The organisation of the Water Lilies, too, has clear general similarities with the free arrangements of Hokusai's Flowers."

"Nowhere is Hokusai's gift of design more nobly seen than in the set of prints generally called the Large Flowers ,, in these there is a grand simplicity, which this artist too often sacrificed in his enormous zest for life."