Irises at Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges)

Kōrin came back to Kyoto in 1709 after several years working for patrons in Edo, and these screens date from the years after that return. He was past 50, and he had grown up inside the Kariganeya, his family's Kyoto textile house, which supplied kimono to aristocratic households and collapsed in his lifetime. The subject needed no caption here. In The Ise Stories, a courtier banished from the capital reaches a marsh called Yatsuhashi, where a river splits into eight channels, each crossed by a plank. The irises growing there set him composing a poem about the wife he left behind, its lines beginning with the syllables of the word for iris. Kōrin painted the planks and the flowers and left the travellers out, on the safe assumption that anyone looking would supply them. In an earlier pair of iris screens, now in Tokyo, he had left out the bridge as well.