Gyoshū Hayami New Leaves Cushion

When a Masterwork Meets Your Sofa 🛋️

Gyoshū Hayami's New Leaves is not merely a pretty image. It is a profound meditation on spring, on transience, on the extraordinary complexity of the natural world rendered through one of Japan's most refined artistic traditions. Created during the early Taishō period (1912 to 1926), this luminous painting of an upward-gazing forest canopy, all layered greens, gold and dark calligraphic branches, has lost none of its power in the century since it was made.

Gyoshū Hayami (1894 to 1935) was a towering figure in Nihonga painting, a tradition that emerged from the Meiji Restoration and developed through to the end of the Second World War, rooted in classical Japanese techniques including mineral pigments, animal-hide glue and hand-painting on silk or washi paper. Where Western art was racing towards abstraction and modernism, Nihonga artists like Hayami were doing something more subtle and perhaps more difficult: deepening and evolving a tradition of extraordinary refinement.

Hayami was known above all for his sensitivity. His ability to observe the natural world and translate that observation into paint with a precision that feels almost devotional. New Leaves is a perfect example. The painting does not simply show trees. It captures the very feeling of standing beneath a spring canopy, that particular green that exists for only a few weeks before deepening into summer, rendered with a delicacy that is breathtaking.

Details

Dimensions: 18x18"
Material: Premium linen
Design: Double-sided
Printing: Dye sublimation technology for vibrant, fade-resistant colour
Made in: Great Britain

Care Instructions 🧼

Wash outers at 30°C with no more than 800rpm spin cycle.