Blue Landscape Paper Parasol 'Sansui'

White parasol with a blue ink landscape of mountains, pines and a calligraphy column

Mountains in blue ink, and a column of writing. This parasol has a white canopy with a landscape drawn in one blue, mountains rising at the left, pines and a pavilion below them, a boat on water at the bottom, and a column of brushed calligraphy with a red seal at the right, in the manner of a Chinese scroll painting. The blue is a single ink and the white is the paper.

It is the parasol in the collection that is a painting first, and it is the one for a person who reads scrolls.

The name, Sansui, is mountains and water, the name of the landscape genre itself, and the canopy is one.

The frame is wood: a straight shaft, a ring of thin ribs radiating from a red-lacquered cap at the top, and a second ring of stretchers beneath that push the ribs open, with a runner that slides up the shaft and locks. The canopy is a cloth with the look of oiled paper, not paper, which is why it survives a shower, a suitcase and a child, and why the print is even to the edge.

Carry it closed by the shaft and open it with the runner, which slides up and clicks. It is a parasol first: made for sun and for photographs, over a yukata or a kimono at a festival, a wedding, a garden, and it will shrug off a few drops of rain but not an afternoon of it. Opened and hung from its cap, it is a lamp shade without the lamp.

The inscription is a Chinese poem in a brush hand with three larger characters beside it and a red seal beneath, the way a scroll is signed, and it tells you the print is copied from a painting. The mountains rise in the flat, layered way of the old manuals.

Every umbrella in the collection is photographed open, standing on its cap, on the same pale ground at the same scale, so the pages compare: they are the same size and the same frame, and the canopy is the difference.

Dry it open if it gets wet, out of the sun, and close it only when the canopy is dry. Store it closed in its sleeve. The ribs are thin, so it is carried, not thrown.

From across a garden it is a white circle with blue on it. From close the blue is mountains and pines, the column its characters, and the seal its red. It is the parasol for a plain kimono and a person who reads scrolls.