Two Poems from the Ogura hyakunin isshu

This fragment from a much longer scroll depicts a full lotus leaf and a stem bent by the wind, signaling a seasonal change and the onset of autumn. The structure of the complete scroll, known to us solely from an early twentieth-century collotype reproduction, featured the life cycle of the lotus plant—budding, blooming, and decaying—painted in silver and gold by Sōtatsu. Kōetsu’s calligraphy, exquisitely balanced with the painting’s rhythms, renders select poems from the thirteenth-century anthology Hyakunin isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Hundred Poems). He used the Taikyoan Kōetsu signature after 1615, when he moved to Takagamine, in the northwest foothills above Kyoto. This work is the last-known collaboration between the artists.