Vintage Japanese Hanging Scroll — Bush Clover, Cricket & Dragonfly — Autumn Hana-Mushi-zu — Shijō Nihonga — Signed Takeru — Hagi Season Poem

This vintage Japanese kakemono (掛け物) presents hana-mushi-zu (花虫図) — 
flower-and-insect painting — one of the most intimate and seasonally precise 
genres in all of Japanese art. The subject is autumn: not the dramatic autumn 
of red maples and pagodas, but the quiet, grassy, close-to-the-ground autumn 
of the Japanese countryside that poets have written about for thirteen centuries.

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𝗛𝗔𝗚𝗜: 𝗝𝗔𝗣𝗔𝗡'𝗦 𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗦𝗧 𝗙𝗟𝗢𝗪𝗘𝗥 𝗢𝗙 𝗔𝗨𝗧𝗨𝗠𝗡

Hagi (萩, bush clover — Lespedeza) appears 141 times in the Man'yōshū 
(万葉集, 759 CE) — Japan's oldest and most revered poetry anthology — 
more than any other plant. More than the cherry blossom. More than the 
chrysanthemum. More than the plum.

This is not an accident. Hagi represents everything that Japanese aesthetics 
prizes about autumn: the small and easily overlooked, the muted over the 
vivid, the sound of wind through delicate stems over the visual spectacle 
of colour. Its tiny pink-purple flowers are individually unremarkable; 
as a mass of nodding branches in the autumn wind, they are unforgettable.

The hagi was the flower of the autumn moon-viewing parties (月見, tsukimi) 
held by Heian aristocrats. It was the flower that Matsuo Bashō (松尾芭蕉, 
1644–1694) — Japan's greatest haiku poet — associated most deeply with 
the season. It remains one of the seven autumn plants (秋の七草, aki no 
nanakusa) that define the Japanese experience of the season.

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𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗗𝗦 𝗜𝗡 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗣𝗔𝗜𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚

Look closely at the lower left of this scroll: among the stems and leaves, 
two insects make their presence known.

A cricket (コオロギ, kōrogi) — antennae long, body dark, resting on a stem — 
and a dragonfly (蜻蛉, tombo) — wings spread, hovering near the ground.

In Japanese culture, the sounds of autumn insects are not background noise — 
they are the season's music. From the Heian period onward, aristocrats 
organized mushikiki (虫聴き, "insect-listening" parties) in temple gardens, 
sitting in the dark to hear crickets sing. The court lady Murasaki Shikibu 
(紫式部, c. 973–1014) wrote in the Genji Monogatari of characters who 
collected singing insects in decorated cages.

The painter who added these two small creatures to this scroll was not 
filling space. They were composing a complete sensory experience — 
the visual (hagi in mineral blue-green), the sonic (cricket's song, 
dragonfly's wing-hum), and the tactile (the autumn chill implied by 
the warm brown of dying grass stems) — all within a single hanging paper.

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𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗛𝗡𝗜𝗤𝗨𝗘 & 𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗜𝗦𝗧

The technical approach belongs to the Shijō school (四条派) at its most 
refined — direct observation of nature rendered with minimal means:

- Hagi leaves: mokkotsu (没骨) in mineral gunjo (群青, ultramarine) 
  and rokushō (緑青, malachite green) — each leaf a single wet 
  brushstroke placed with precision, the colour mixing on the paper 
  rather than the palette, creating the subtle blue-green variation 
  of living foliage

- Hagi flowers: the palest possible wash of pink-purple mineral pigment 
  — barely there — the way hagi flowers actually appear en masse: 
  present but not insistent

- Autumn grass: kasure (掠れ) dry-brush in warm brown — 
  the bristles dragging across the surface at speed — 
  capturing the texture of dry autumn stems without 
  a single slow stroke

- Insects: saimyō (細描) fine detail work — the cricket 
  in particular is rendered with entomological accuracy 
  in a few dozen strokes that would be invisible at the 
  scroll's full viewing distance but reward close inspection

The vast empty space above the composition — more than half the 
scroll's length — is the painting's most important element: 
the sky through which the dragonfly has just passed, 
the silence in which the cricket's song will resound.

Signed with brush name 竹るのね (Takeru no Ne — 
"The Sound/Root of Bamboo") — a poetic gago that 
places the artist within the tradition of listening 
to the natural world. Oval red seal below — the same 
distinctive oval seal format seen in other works of 
this period, suggesting an artist of confident and 
individualistic aesthetic identity.

Estimated period: Shōwa era (c. 1940s–1960s).

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𝗠𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚 & 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡

Mounted in two-colour hon-hyōgu (本表具): the main border 
in warm terracotta brocade with gold cloud-scroll (唐草, karakusa) 
pattern, the upper heaven border (天裂, ten-gire) in a darker 
floral brocade — a sophisticated two-fabric mounting that frames 
the cool blue-green of the painting with warmth and depth.

Condition: Very good. Paper bright with minimal toning. 
Pigments vivid — the mineral blues and greens particularly 
stable. Mounting intact and sound.

📋 Period and attribution are based on stylistic and material 
analysis only. No certificate of authenticity is included. 
Sold as-is.