Camellias | Yamanaka Shūhan 山中秋帆 | 1832-1892

No biographical details are known about this painter. His esteem is demonstrated above all by his participation in a joint work with the most famous painters of Kyoto of his time. The painting depicts the Sixteen Arhats (Chinese sages and saints) and is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

This camellia painting, which was converted into a panel as a scroll painting, clearly shows the painter's aesthetic roots in the tradition of the Shijō school, which was the dominant style in Kyoto in the 19th century. The care taken in the format design, the accents with open flowers and the play with the buds and the different colored and multi-shaped leaves correspond perfectly to the syntax of this style. Yamanaka Shūhan's painting is less influenced by the modernizing trends of the late 19th century than by the classical art of the 18th and early 19th centuries.  He is not an innovator in his time, but a talented traditionalist.

Camellias are actually winter flowers in Japan. When all the bushes in the parks and gardens are bare, the camellias with their dark, fleshy leaves and intensely colored petals add a strong accent to the landscape. In Japan, there are many varieties of camellias in different shades of red, as well as pink, snow-white or speckled white and red, etc. The camellia is a traditionally symbolic flower: because the flower falls from the stem in one piece, it reminded the samurai of being beheaded and was therefore never planted in their gardens.