Turnip and Grasshopper, Umber

About this print

A turnip with its leaves curling back on themselves, and a grasshopper climbing the stem. The inscription, 霜後已成, says that after the frost the harvest is ready.

The Mysterious Garden

Itō Jakuchū, 1716–1800

Itō Jakuchū was the eldest son of a Kyoto greengrocer. Around the age of forty he handed the family business to his brother and spent the rest of his long life painting the birds, insects and vegetables he knew so well.

In 1768 he published Genpo Yōka, a small album made to look like rubbings taken from carved stone. Instead of dark lines on white paper, the motifs sit pale against a deep ground, as if they had been pressed out of the dark.

These prints follow that idea. Each plate is reworked by hand at full poster scale, keeping the broken edges and grain of the original, then set on a quiet ground: moss, sumi ink, indigo or umber. The same piece can sit in very different rooms.