燕子花图屏风

Around 1701 Ogata Korin painted this pair of six-panel screens, and though it looks like pure decoration, every viewer of his day would have caught the reference. There is no ground and no water drawn in, only drifts of blue irises against flat gold leaf, but the irises themselves are the clue. They point to a famous passage in the Tales of Ise, an old collection of poems, where a traveller comes to a marsh called Yatsuhashi, the eight bridges, where a stream splits into eight channels. Irises are blooming there, and their name in Japanese, kakitsubata, gives the first sound of each line of a poem he composes about the home and the wife he has left behind. So a wealthy Edo-period owner unfolding this screen would read the flowers as that whole story of travel and longing, without a single word or figure shown. Korin holds to just three notes, the blue of the petals, the green of the leaves, and the gold behind. It is a National Treasure of Japan, kept at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo.