Clusters of blue-violet irises rise from green leaves against a field of gold leaf. A zigzag of gray planks crosses the screen from side to side. There are no people, no water and no sky. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns the pair of six-panel folding screens, painted by Ogata Kōrin after 1709 in ink and color on gold leaf.
The scene comes from the Tales of Ise, a classic of Japanese literature. In one episode the hero, exiled from Kyoto after an affair with a court lady, stops at a place called Yatsuhashi, where a stream splits into eight channels, each crossed by a bridge. Seeing irises there, he writes a poem of longing for the capital. The poem is an acrostic: the first syllable of each of its lines spells kakitsubata, the Japanese word for iris. The poem is why the irises are there.
Kōrin leaves out the figure of the poet and every other detail of the story. The flowers and the angular bridge carry all of it. The bridge slides across the pair of screens in a Z shape, and the repeated irises work like a rhythm, so that the whole thing reads as a design more than a landscape. Kōrin's iris screens are among the best-known images in Japanese art.
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