Bamboo and Plum Tree

Of the "pine, bamboo, and plum" known as an auspicious motif, this screen omits the pine and paints only bamboo and plum. Using ink alone on a gold ground, it depicts a bamboo grove boldly and simply, with a twisted old plum tree blossoming daintily there. It is ink on paper with a gold ground, in a horizontal format 65.2 cm high and 181.0 cm wide, and is designated an Important Cultural Property.

Bamboo trunks of differing thicknesses stand at intervals, and the bamboo leaves are rendered in shades of ink, set off by the brightness of the gold ground. On the right, a plum branch stretches sideways with small flowers in bloom. The artist, Ogata Korin, loved plum, and his plum design, in which a five-petaled flower is drawn as a circle, became fashionable and is also called "Korin plum."