Plum Drawn from the Mind

The practice of painting blossoming plum branches in monochrome ink seems to have emerged in 10th-century China, and it became popular among the Japanese literati of the 18th and 19th centuries. Delicate flowers budding from a wizened plum tree in winter carried associations of longevity, renewal, and purity. The inscription, shai, meaning “drawn from the mind, ” is the opposite of shasei, or “sketched from life”; indeed, this is a particularly free-spirited and imaginative interpretation of this subject. A variety of tones of ink applied in impressionistic splotches with a wet brush convey the vital splendor of a plum tree breaking into a profusion of blossoms on the cusp of spring. Baichi was a priest of the Pure Land, or Jōdo, school of Buddhism and was known for his poetry, calligraphy, and paintings of landscapes and flora.