Susini in fiore rossi e bianchi

This is one of the last things Ogata Korin made, probably around 1715, a year or so before he died. Two folding screens stand side by side, a white plum tree on the left, a red one on the right, and between them a broad stylised river in patterned silver curling down a ground of gold leaf. There is no landscape, no horizon, no season beyond the blossom itself. Korin came from a wealthy Kyoto family of textile merchants, and the flat, bold patterning owes something to that world of painted fabric and design. Japan counts the screens a National Treasure, and the museum in Atami puts them on show only about a month each year, in late winter, when the real plum trees flower.