Gorgeous Autumn & Winter Japanese Flowers by Tanigami Kōnan
These autumn and winter flower prints by Tanigami Kōnan come from his beautiful 1917 book Seiyō Sōka Zufu. Their mix of Japanese design and vintage botanical detail makes them lovely for framing, collage, junk journals and all sorts of creative projects.
These stunning flower prints come from Seiyō Sōka Zufu, a 1917 collection by the Japanese artist Tanigami Kōnan. The title is usually translated as A Picture Album of Western Plants and Flowers, which fits well, as the books are filled with familiar garden flowers interpreted in a distinctly Japanese style. The collection is organised by season, with separate volumes for spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and this post focuses on the richly coloured flowers of the colder months.
What makes these prints so appealing is the way Kōnan balances botanical observation with decorative design. The flowers are recognisable and carefully drawn, but they are not presented like stiff scientific specimens. Instead, stems curve across the page, leaves overlap naturally, and blooms fill the composition.
Tanigami Kōnan and His Flower Designs
Tanigami Kōnan was a Japanese painter and designer working in Kyoto in the early twentieth century. His flower books are a lovely example of a period when Japanese artists combined traditional painting and printmaking ideas with increasingly international influences. In Seiyō Sōka Zufu, he turned his attention to Western garden plants, but rather than copying the conventions of European botanical illustration, he treated them with the strong compositions, flattened colour and decorative sense found in Japanese art.
That is probably why these prints still feel so fresh. Kōnan often isolates a single spray of flowers or foliage against a plain background, concentrating on shape, movement and colour rather than trying to reproduce an entire garden scene. They are botanical enough to identify the plant, but decorative enough to work beautifully as art in their own right.
More Japanese Flowers and Floral Designs
If you enjoy these prints, Picture Box Blue offers plenty of other Japanese flowers and patterns to explore. The Kōno Bairei flower and bird prints are more naturalistic and combine plants with beautifully observed birds. At the same time, the Yokohama Nursery catalogue illustrations are packed with colourful vintage flowers and garden plants.
How to Download the Japanese Flower Prints
To download a flower print, click the title above the image. This will open a larger version of the print in a new browser tab or window. From there, right-click the image and choose Save Image As to save it to your computer.
These vintage flowers would work beautifully as wall art, but they would also be lovely for collage, decoupage, junk journals, card making and other paper crafts. They look particularly great when printed on watercolour paper.
Autumn/Winter Flowers 1-12
Red, white and pink geranium or pelargonium flowers
Print 2: More Geranium-Type Flowers
Red daisy-like gerbera flower, purple pansy-like blooms and bold patterned leaves.
Bright yellow senna or cassia flowers.
Tanigami Hironami Japanese botanical print of orange clivia, or bush lily, flowers with long dark strap-like leaves.
Print 6: Red & White Poinsettia
There are more poinsettia flower prints in this collection of Christmas flowers.
Find more vintage orchid prints here.
Print 8: Yellow Dancing Lady Orchids
Pink and white orchid flowers, including moth orchid-like blooms, with mottled leaves.
Plate 11: Pink Cattleya Orchids
Print 12: White Spider-Like Orchids
Flower Prints 13-24
Plate 13: Pink Cattleya Orchids
Print 14: Pink & White Dendrobium Orchids
With dark purple centres.
Plate 16: Red Anthurium Spathe
The common name is Flamingo Flower.
Print 17: Slender Cymbidium orchid
Check out the lily flower collection on the site.
Red fuchsia bells with a cluster of blue salvia-like flowers
Print 24: More Cineraria Flowers
Other Flower Collections
If these autumn and winter flowers have put you in the mood for more Japanese florals, have a look at the vintage Japanese iris paintings. It’s a gorgeous collection of colourful irises, with wonderfully poetic names and beautiful artwork.
For a very different take on seasonal flowers, Henry Fletcher’s Twelve Months of Flowers is another 18th-century collection, with a flower print for each month of the year. And if you’re in the mood for more blooms, browse the Picture Box Blue flower collection, where you’ll find everything from Japanese florals and wildflowers to Victorian botanical illustrations and decorative flower patterns.
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