Irises screen

Irises (紙本金地著色燕子花図, shihonkinji chakushoku kakitsubata-zu) is a pair of six-panel folding screens (byōbu) by the Japanese artist Ogata Kōrin of the Rinpa school.

A similar pair of screens made by Ogata Kōrin about 5[3] to 12[4] years later depicting irises is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

It depicts bunches of abstracted blue Japanese irises in bloom, and their green foliage, creating a rhythmically repeating but varying pattern across the panels.

[12] 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.

(Ise Monogatari 9, also Kokin Wakashū 9:410)The screens clearly influenced the Irises paintings by Vincent van Gogh: he could never have seen the originals, which were still in Japan, but they were reproduced as woodcuts in a collection, the Kōrin Hyakuzu Kōhen.