Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Three gently sloping stems of bush clover painted just before the buds open are the subject of this simple fan composition. Bush clover or hagi is one of the seven plants of autumn and is a primary element in many compositions of the flowers of the four seasons in Edo period art, most notably in the work of Rimpa artists using the Inen seal in the seventeenth century. The white bush clover is most often featured in those works, however Soken clearly preferred the pink variety. The flowers appear in his large-scale flower paintings as well, such as a pair of screens of spring and autumn grasses and flowers painted on gold leaf ground in the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art [Minamoto and Sasaki, 41, 187]. This fan painting is almost an exact quote of a section of that larger composition.

Though details of his personal life are few, Yamaguchi Soken was one of Maruyama Ōkyo’s ten best pupils, known traditionally for his paintings of beauties. However, his talent was by no means limited to figure paintings, and he produced several printed books of his ink painting and flower and grasses compositions. His Soken gafu kusabana no bu (Illustrations by Soken, Flowers and Grasses Part) was published in 1806 and contains a full three volumes of illustrations [a copy is in the British Museum. Unfortunately, it does not contain an image of bush clover].