''Carp and Pine'' is an

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

Japanese

woodblock print Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Each page or image is create ...

. Created on commission for a club in Kamige by

Yashima Gakutei Yashima Gakutei ( ja, 八島岳亭; 1868) was a Japanese artist and poet who was a pupil of both Totoya Hokkei and Hokusai. Gakutei is best known for his kyōka poetry and surimono works. Biography Gakutei was born in Osaka around 1786, thou ...

, the work depicts a dark-scaled

carp Carp are various species of oily freshwater fish from the family Cyprinidae, a very large group of fish native to Europe and Asia. While carp is consumed in many parts of the world, they are generally considered an invasive species in parts of ...

resting in muddy water. The work, which is in the collection of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, was described by the museum as "the quintessential fish

surimono are a genre of Japanese woodblock print. They were privately commissioned for special occasions such as the New Year. Surimono literally means "printed thing". Being produced in small numbers for a mostly educated audience of ''literati'', ...

References

{{Met-stub Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art