Furuya Kōrin: Life, Japanese Design Books & Art Prints
The Kyoto designer who made Rinpa modern. The story of Furuya Kōrin, pupil of Kamisaka Sekka, from Shiga to the Meiji design studios, the woodblock plates of Bijutsukai and Shin-Bijutsukai, his ceremonial displays and Kōrin moyō, with his famous designs, where to see them and how to hang Furuya Kōrin wall art at home. By Artwork Culture.
Furuya Kōrin (1875–1910) was a Kyoto designer who turned the old Rinpa style of Japanese painting into modern pattern. His woodblock-printed plates are full of cranes crossing a black sky, cherry blossoms on bright blue, rivers of chrysanthemums, folding fans and waves cut into bold, flat shapes, made as ideas for kimono, lacquer and interiors. He studied with Kamisaka Sekka, compiled the design magazine Shin-Bijutsukai for the Kyoto publisher Unsōdō and died at about thirty-five. Browse our Furuya Kōrin art prints.
This guide follows Kōrin from Shiga Prefecture to the Kyoto design studios of the Meiji era, explains Rinpa and the zuan (design) books he made, and looks at his best-known work, the plates of Bijutsukai and Shin-Bijutsukai, his Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays and Kōrin moyō. It also covers where to see his books and how to hang Furuya Kōrin wall art at home.
Who Was Furuya Kōrin?
Furuya Kōrin was a zuanka, a professional designer, in the Kyoto arts and crafts world of the late Meiji period (1868–1912). He painted, taught design and above all made designs to be printed: pattern books and magazines whose colour woodblock plates showed weavers, dyers and lacquer makers what a new kimono, fan or box could look like. You will also see his name written Kōrin Furuya or Furutani Kōrin.
How to spot a Furuya Kōrin design:
- Flat colour, no shadows: birds, leaves and petals cut into simple silhouettes, as in the geese of Pl. 14.
- Rinpa motifs: waves, cranes, pines, plum and cherry blossoms, chrysanthemums and autumn maples, the stock of the Rinpa school since the 1600s.
- Strong grounds: a whole sheet of black, orange or bright blue behind the motif, as in the cherry blossoms of Pl. 166.
- Pattern that spills off the edge: designs cropped by the frame, as they would be on a length of cloth.
- Split panels: two different designs stacked on one page, top and bottom, like Pl. 41.
Early Life: From Shiga to the Kyoto Studios
Furuya Kōrin was born in 1875 in Kaizu, a lakeside town in Shiga Prefecture on the northern shore of Lake Biwa. As a young man he moved to Kyoto, the old imperial capital and the centre of Japan’s luxury textile trade, and studied painting with the Kyoto artist Suzuki Mannen. In 1892 he began to study design with Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), the designer who led the revival of Rinpa in Meiji Kyoto. The English-language sources add the Western-style painter Asai Chū as another teacher.
Kyoto’s Exhibition of New and Old Art (Shinko Bijutsuhin Tenrankai) gave him his start. In 1896 a design for sashimono, fine cabinet work, won a prize at the second exhibition, and more prizes followed; the English Wikipedia biography records a win in the painting category in 1897. In later years he served as one of the exhibition’s judges.
Kamisaka Sekka, Ogata Kōrin and the Rinpa Revival
Rinpa is a school of Japanese decorative painting and design that began in Kyoto around 1600 with Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Hon’ami Kōetsu. It takes its name from Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), whose screens, fans and lacquer reduced irises, waves and plum trees to bold, flat shapes on gold. Unlike the Kanō or Tosa schools, Rinpa was never a single workshop: artists such as Sakai Hōitsu in the 1800s revived it by studying the earlier masters.
Furuya Kōrin chose his art name in homage. His Kōrin is written 紅麟, not 光琳, but the sound is the same, and he described himself as a “Kōrin of the modern age”. Through his teacher Sekka he belonged to the last great revival of the style. Sekka, sent to Europe by the Japanese government in 1901, saw the Art Nouveau that Japanese art had helped to inspire; back in Kyoto he and his circle kept the Rinpa motifs but made them simpler, brighter and more graphic. Japanese sources describe Furuya Kōrin as Sekka’s likely successor and as the heir of Rinpa design in modern Japan.
Zuan: Kyoto’s Design Books and the Kimono Trade
Zuan (図案) means design or pattern, and a zuanka was a designer who drew patterns for others to make. In Meiji Kyoto, kimono weavers and dyers, fan makers, lacquerers and potters needed a steady flow of new ideas, and publishers answered with zuanchō, design books printed from woodblocks. The pages show motifs on their own or arranged as they might appear on cloth, often with several ideas on a sheet.
Kōrin’s main publisher was Unsōdō (芸艸堂), founded in Kyoto in 1891 by Yamada Naosaburō. Its early list was largely kimono pattern books, and the firm is still in business in Kyoto, printing by hand from carved woodblocks. Each Kōrin plate was printed with a separate block for every colour, so the flat areas of orange, blue or purple you see in Pl. 23 or Pl. 49 are layers of water-based pigment pressed into the paper.
Bijutsukai and Shin-Bijutsukai: The Sea of Art Magazines
Bijutsukai (美術海) means “Sea of Art”. Unsōdō launched a design periodical under that name in the 1890s, and in the early 1900s followed it with Shin-Bijutsukai, the “New Sea of Art”, compiled by Furuya Kōrin. Its English subtitle called it “the new monthly magazine of various designs by the famous artists of to-day”. Library records date the run differently: the Getty Research Institute’s set starts with an issue of 25 May 1902 and ends with issue 36 of 15 August 1906, while the Smithsonian Libraries hold issues dated 1901–1902.
Each issue was a slim book of colour woodblock plates bound in the Japanese way, on folded double leaves, with almost no text. The designs range from flowers and birds to stripes, lattices, waves and pure abstraction, and some look decades ahead of their time: the cut-out geese of Pl. 14 or the swirling marbled ground of Pl. 88 would not look out of place in 1925. The magazines gathered work by several Kyoto designers, with Sekka and Kōrin at their head; library catalogues credit the series to Kōrin as compiler, and our 238 plates are sold under his name, titled Bijutsukai and dated 1901 after their digitised source.
Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays
In 1903 Kōrin published Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays (旧儀装飾十六式図譜, Kyūgi sōshoku jūroku-shiki zufu), a woodblock-printed book in orihon, accordion-fold binding. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds a copy, describes it as showing how elite residences of old Japan decorated their public rooms for special occasions. Each double-page scene is an interior laid out like a stage set: curtained screens, lacquer stands, mirrors, folded robes and arms.
Our 16 prints follow the book page by page. Pl. 01 is the calligraphic title page with the table of contents and Pl. 16 the closing text; the plates between show rooms hung with robes (Pl. 05), robes, mirror stands, a koto and a biwa before striped hangings (Pl. 07), gold folding screens and potted displays (Pl. 11) and a hall of samurai armour, bows and spears (Pl. 14).
Clouds, Pine, Bamboo and Kōrin Moyō
Between 1903 and 1907 Kōrin produced a run of design books for Unsōdō, most of them in orihon, accordion binding. They include:
- Unkashū (1903): clouds and mist as design elements; the Baltimore Museum of Art holds two volumes, printed in 1906.
- Matsu-zukushi and Date moyō hana-zukushi (1905): albums of pine-tree designs and of flowers and plants.
- Take-zukushi: an album of bamboo designs, dated 1905 or 1907 in different sources.
- Ume-zukushi, Hana-ikada and Tokonatsu: plum designs, “flower rafts” and designs for folding fans.
- Kōrin moyō (1907): two volumes of Kōrin patterns, first meant as a sample book for the kimono industry.
Kōrin moyō is the best known. Its waves, flowers and the old Rinpa image of a boatman in a skiff show Kōrin at his most confident, and the Metropolitan Museum curator John T. Carpenter called it impressive in his 2012 book Designing Nature: The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art. Copies are in the Freer Gallery study collection in Washington and the Arthur Tress Collection at the University of Pennsylvania.
Teaching, Early Death and Legacy
In 1900 Kōrin joined the staff of the Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, where Sekka also taught, and in 1905 he became an assistant professor. In 1906 Unsōdō published colour woodblocks by him, such as Gin sekai (Silver World), in its anthology Seiei. Then, in 1910, he fell suddenly ill and died, aged about thirty-five, with his career only half done.
His books outlived him. Unsōdō still holds the woodblocks for Kōrin moyō, and Kōrin’s designs have found new audiences since libraries put Shin-Bijutsukai online. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum and the Smithsonian. Set beside Maurice Pillard Verneuil, E. A. Séguy or Christopher Dresser, his plates show how freely ideas moved between Kyoto and Europe around 1900.
Famous Furuya Kōrin Designs
Kōrin’s plates are numbered rather than titled, so collectors know them by their motifs. These eight are among the most striking in our collection; the names are our descriptions.
Cherry Blossoms on Blue
Big five-petalled cherry blossoms in cream, with feathery yellow and red stamens and a few green leaves, sit on a flat, vivid blue ground (Pl. 166). It is the plate most often reproduced from the series, and the one on this page’s cover.
Wild Geese on Black (Pl. 1)
The first plate in our set (Pl. 1) is also the most restrained: a skein of white-outlined geese on black, an autumn image from Japanese poetry. Pair it with the red-crowned cranes of Pl. 43 or the purple birds of Pl. 5.
Chrysanthemum River
A blue stream with curling crests winds down the page through pink, white and yellow chrysanthemums (Pl. 73). Flowers floating on water is an old Rinpa theme, here set out as a kimono pattern.
Folding Fans
Open folding fans in orange, cream, navy and yellow overlap on a pink ground (Pl. 133). Fans were a Rinpa speciality; for more, see Pl. 96, Pl. 102, Pl. 141, Pl. 205.
Butterflies
Black, yellow and pale green swallowtails tumble across a cream sheet (Pl. 115). Butterflies return in Pl. 169, Pl. 202, Pl. 204.
Maples on Stripes
Red, orange, green and white maple leaves fall over vertical stripes of green, blue and yellow (Pl. 219): autumn colour on a modern ground. More maples: Pl. 65, Pl. 135, Pl. 138, Pl. 206.
Peonies on Blue
Crimson peonies on grey-green stems climb between columns of white roundels on a bright blue ground (Pl. 167).
Ripples and Wave
Fine blue concentric rings spread across the page while a dark blue wave crest breaks through them (Pl. 238), the last Bijutsukai plate in our set and one of the most abstract.
What Our Furuya Kōrin Prints Show
Our Furuya Kōrin collection holds 254 prints: 238 Bijutsukai design plates, numbered 1 to 238, and all 16 pages of Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays. The design plates fall into a few big families:
- Waves and water: Pl. 54, Pl. 69, Pl. 88, Pl. 155, Pl. 175, Pl. 212, Pl. 228, Pl. 238.
- Cranes, geese and other birds: Pl. 1, Pl. 2, Pl. 5, Pl. 14, Pl. 42, Pl. 43, Pl. 62, Pl. 66, Pl. 183.
- Flowers: plum Pl. 23; cherry Pl. 166, Pl. 26; pinks and plum Pl. 30; chrysanthemum Pl. 20, Pl. 79, Pl. 174; peony Pl. 130, Pl. 167; mixed flowers Pl. 33, Pl. 40, Pl. 48, Pl. 59, Pl. 161.
- Pine and bamboo: Pl. 18, Pl. 22, Pl. 41, Pl. 57, Pl. 74, Pl. 82, Pl. 97, Pl. 149.
- Stripes, lattices and abstract grounds: Pl. 3, Pl. 8, Pl. 9, Pl. 17, Pl. 47, Pl. 63, Pl. 70, Pl. 89, Pl. 92, Pl. 153, Pl. 237.
- Tortoiseshell hexagons and crests: Pl. 66, Pl. 98, Pl. 139, Pl. 221.
- Vases, robes and even an electric lamp: Pl. 34, Pl. 137, Pl. 186, Pl. 222, and Pl. 193, a line design for an indoor electric light, a sign of Meiji modern life.
- Snow crystals: Pl. 76, Pl. 207.
Many plates are in two parts, with a different pattern in the top and bottom halves, because the original pages offered more than one idea per sheet. A few are drawn in fine line only, as preparatory outlines; these suit a minimalist wall.
Where to See Furuya Kōrin’s Work
Kōrin made books, not paintings for walls, so his work lives mainly in museum libraries and print rooms. Bound volumes are rarely on show and are usually seen by appointment in study rooms, and several sets have been scanned and put online; check each museum’s website before you travel.
The main places to look:
New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns Sixteen Illustrations of Ancient Ceremonial Displays (1903) and copies of Shin-Bijutsukai; its curator John T. Carpenter discusses Kōrin in Designing Nature: The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art (2012).
Washington, D.C.
The National Museum of Asian Art (Freer Gallery study collection) holds Kōrin moyō and other Kōrin pattern books, and the Smithsonian Libraries hold Shin-Bijutsukai issues from 1901–1902.
London and Amsterdam
The British Museum and the Rijksmuseum both list works by Furuya Kōrin in their print and book collections.
Online and in Kyoto
The Getty Research Institute has scanned 36 issues of Shin-Bijutsukai for the Internet Archive, and Penn’s Arthur Tress Collection shows Kōrin moyō. In Kyoto, Unsōdō still publishes and prints from woodblocks.
How to Decorate With Furuya Kōrin Prints
Kōrin’s plates were made to decorate things, so they settle into a room easily. Their flat colour and strong pattern read well from across a room, and the cream paper around each design looks good with a wide mat.
- Hang a grid. Nine or twelve plates in matching thin black or natural wood frames make a pattern wall; mix busy sheets like Pl. 23 with calm ones like Pl. 183.
- Pick one colour family. Blues (Pl. 20, Pl. 166, Pl. 175, Pl. 238) suit a bathroom or bedroom; oranges and blacks (Pl. 23, Pl. 66, Pl. 228) warm a living room or hallway.
- Follow the seasons. Plum and cherry for spring, swallows and waves for summer, maples and geese for autumn, snow crystals for winter, just as kimono patterns did.
- Go big with one plate. A single large print of Pl. 14 or Pl. 49 works as modern abstract art over a sofa or bed.
- Hang the ceremonial scenes long. The wide Ceremonial Displays plates, such as Pl. 07, sit well above a sideboard or along a corridor.
- Mix with friends. Pair Kōrin with his teacher Kamisaka Sekka, with Kōno Bairei’s birds and flowers or Hokusai’s waves.
For more Japanese art, browse Sakai Hōitsu, Shibata Zeshin, Ogata Gekkō, Hiroshige and Ohara Koson, or our Japanese art prints and Art Nouveau prints.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Furuya Kōrin?
Furuya Kōrin (1875–1910) was a Japanese designer and illustrator in Meiji-era Kyoto. A pupil of Kamisaka Sekka, he made woodblock-printed design books and compiled the design magazine Shin-Bijutsukai for the Kyoto publisher Unsōdō.
Is Furuya Kōrin the same as Ogata Kōrin?
No. Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) was the Edo-period painter who gave the Rinpa school its name. Furuya Kōrin, born in 1875, chose an art name that sounds the same (written 紅麟 rather than 光琳) in homage, and called himself a “Kōrin of the modern age”.
What is Bijutsukai?
Bijutsukai (Sea of Art) and its successor Shin-Bijutsukai (New Sea of Art) were design periodicals published by Unsōdō in Kyoto. Each issue was a small book of colour woodblock design plates with little text. Library records credit Shin-Bijutsukai to Furuya Kōrin as compiler and date it to about 1901–1906.
What is Rinpa?
Rinpa is a Japanese school of decorative painting and design that began in Kyoto around 1600 with Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Hon’ami Kōetsu and is named after Ogata Kōrin. It is known for flat shapes, gold and silver grounds and motifs such as waves, irises, plum blossoms and cranes. Kamisaka Sekka and Furuya Kōrin led its modern revival.
What is Kōrin moyō?
Kōrin moyō (Kōrin Patterns) is a two-volume design book Furuya Kōrin published with Unsōdō in 1907. It was first meant as a sample book for the kimono industry and shows waves, flowers and other Rinpa motifs.
Where can I see Furuya Kōrin’s work?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, the British Museum and the Rijksmuseum hold his books and prints. Scans of Shin-Bijutsukai from the Getty Research Institute are free to view on the Internet Archive.
Where can I buy Furuya Kōrin art prints?
Artwork Culture sells archival wall art prints of 254 Furuya Kōrin designs, in sizes from 4×6 to 40×60 inches. Browse the Furuya Kōrin collection for the 238 Bijutsukai plates and the 16 ceremonial-display scenes.
Written by Artwork Culture. Image credits: all artwork images are Artwork Culture product photos of Furuya Kōrin prints. Facts follow the English and Japanese Wikipedia biographies, Wikidata, the library records of the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian Libraries, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Asian Art and the Arthur Tress Collection at the University of Pennsylvania (October 2026). Plate names in this guide describe the designs; store titles follow the plate numbers of the digitised source, and library records date the magazines differently, so confirm details before you cite them.