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Japan: 'Peonies and a Red-billed Blue Magpie'. Hanging scroll painting by Kakutei (1722-1786), 1769.<br/><br/> Kakutei (1722 - 23 January 1786) was a Japainese painter from Nagasaki, who was part of the Nanpin school of painting, which was influenced by Chinese art and culture. He became an ordained Obaku monk, and moved to Kyoto and Osaka, where he thrived artistically.
Japan: 'Peony and Bamboo by a Rock'. Hanging scroll painting by Ike Gyokuran (1727-1784), 1768.<br/><br/> Ike Gyokuran (1727-1784), birth name Machi and art-name Gyokuran, was a Japanese Bunjinga/Nanga (literati) painter, poet and calligrapher. She was known as Tokuyama Gyokuran before her marriage to fellow artist Ike no Taiga. He taught her the Bunjinga/Nanga painting style, while she taught him poetry in the Japanese waka style.
Torii Kotondo is known to have made only 21 prints - all of them images of bijin or beautiful women. They belong to the finest works of art of the Shin Hanga movement.<br/><br/> Shin hanga ('new prints') was an art movement in early 20th-century Japan, during the Taisho and Showa periods, that revitalized traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods (17th–19th century).<br/><br/> The movement flourished from around 1915 to 1942, though it resumed briefly from 1946 through the 1950s. Inspired by European Impressionism, the artists incorporated Western elements such as the effects of light and the expression of individual moods, but focused on strictly traditional themes of landscapes (fukeiga), famous places (meisho), beautiful women (bijinga), kabuki actors (yakusha-e), and birds and flowers (kachoga).
The Meiji period, also known as the Meiji era, is a Japanese era which extended from September 8, 1868 through July 30, 1912.<br/><br/> This period represents the first half of the Empire of Japan during which Japanese society moved from being an isolated feudal society to its modern form. Fundamental changes affected its social structure, internal politics, economy, military, and foreign relations.
Yamamoto Shoun (December 30, 1870 - May 10, 1965), who was also known as Matsutani Shoun, was a Japanese print designer, painter, and illustrator. He was born in Kochi into a family of retainers of the Shogun and was given the name Mosaburo. As a teenager, he studied Kano school painting with Yanagimoto Doso and Kawada Shoryu. At about age 17, he moved to Tokyo, where he studied Nanga painting with Taki Katei. At 20 years of age, he was employed as an illustrator for Fugoku Gaho, a pictorial magazine dealing with the sights in and around Tokyo. In his latter career, Shoun primarily produced paintings. He died in 1965, at the age of 96.<br/><br/> In addition to his magazine illustrations, Shoun is best known for his woodblock prints of <i>bijin</i> or 'beautiful women', especially <i>imasugata</i> a kind of precursor to the 'moderngirls / moga' movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Shoun is considered a bridge between the ukiyo-e and shin hanga schools. His career spans the Meiji (1868-1912), Taisho (1912-1926) and Showa (1926-1989) periods.
The peony is a flowering plant in the genus Paeonia, the only genus in the family Paeoniaceae. They are native to Asia, Southern Europe and Western North America. Boundaries between species are not clear and estimates of the number of species range from 25 to 40. Most are herbaceous perennial plants 0.5–1.5 metres (1.6–4.9 ft) tall, but some resemble trees 1.5–3 metres (4.9–9.8 ft) tall. They have compound, deeply lobed leaves and large, often fragrant, flowers, ranging from red to white or yellow, in late spring and early summer.