Cherry Trees along the Sumida River

The image shown is one scroll of the pair, with pale pink and white cherry blossoms on a tall composition. A thick trunk twisting and bending rises diagonally, with a slender young tree alongside in the foreground. The branches stretch out beyond the edge of the picture, and part of the trunk is touched with blue-green.

According to the museum's commentary, the right scroll shows young trees of two kinds of cherry blooming along the Sumida River, and the left scroll shows a young tree and a mature tree growing from a mounded ground like that on the right. The cherry on the left scroll, with its trunk bending and boldly extending beyond the picture, is explained as full of energy and vitality, as if reaching toward the sky.

Shitsushitsu was a woman painter of the late Edo period, born in Omi Province, who studied under Mikuma Roka, known for paintings of cherry blossoms. She is said to have established herself as a painter by seventeen, later been active as the heir to cherry-blossom painting, and in her later years kept painting cherry trees as a nun-painter. The commentary calls this work delicate and elegant, from a time when her style had matured. Each scroll is 114.0 cm high and 42.3 cm wide.