Irises screen

The screens were housed for over 200 years by the Nishi Honganji Buddhist temple in Kyoto. They are now held by the Nezu Museum, and they are a National Treasure of Japan. All four Irises screens were displayed together for the first time in almost a century in 2012 at the "Korin: National Treasure Irises of the Nezu Museum and Eight-Bridge of The Metropolitan Museum of Art" exhibition at the Nezu Museum. Both screens are inspired by an episode in The Tales of Ise. In turn, copies of the screens are believed to have influenced the post-impressionist paintings of Vincent van Gogh, including his Irises.

The screens are among the first works of Japanese painter and lacquerer Ogata Kōrin after he attained the rank of Hokkyō (“Bridge of the Dharma”), the third highest rank awarded to artists. It depicts bunches of abstracted blue Japanese irises in bloom, and their green foliage, creating a rhythmically repeating but varying pattern across the panels. The similarities of some blooms indicate that a stencil was used. The work shows influence of Tawaraya Sōtatsu. It is typical of a new artistic school, Rin-pa (琳派), which takes its name from the last syllable of his given name. Kōrin adopts a very restrained palette, limited to the ultramarine blue of the flowers, the green of their foliage, and the gold background. The work was painted with ink and colour on paper, with squares of gold leaf applied around the painted areas to create a shimmering reflective background reminiscent of water. The deep blue was made from powdered azurite (gunjō). Each six-panel screen measures 150.9 x. The screens were probably made for the Nijō family, and were presented to the Nishi Honganji Buddhist temple in Kyoto. They were sold by the temple in 1913.

Kōrin made a similar work about 5 to 12 years later, another pair of six-panel screens, known as Irises at Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges) (八橋図屏風, Yatsuhashi-zu Byōbu). This second pair of screens has been held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City since 1953, and were last displayed in 2013. The second pair of iris screens, circa 1710–1716, was also painted with ink and color on gold-foiled paper, and measure 179.1 x 371.5 centimetres (70.5 in x 146.25 in) each. Unlike the earlier pair of iris screens, this later pair includes a depiction of an angular bridge, a more explicit reference to the literary work that inspired both artworks.

Both pairs of screens are inspired by an episode in The Tales of Ise, where the unnamed protagonist of the story (most likely Ariwara no Narihira) encounters the flowers near a rustic eight-plank bridge over a river. He was inspired to compose a romantic poem, a form of acrostic where the first syllable of each line spells out the Japanese word for iris, kakitsubata: