The Four Worthies (Plum, Bamboo, Orchid, Chrysanthemum) (Shikunshi 竹洞四君子)
The Four Worthies is a Japanese woodblock picture book of ink-line plant studies, made by the painter Nakabayashi Chikutō and published in Kyoto in 1850 by Hishiya Magobei for artists and students who copied its models. The pages are loose ink drawings of bamboo, flowering plum, and orchid, with rocks and sparse brushwork and wide empty paper around the motifs. A designer could take from them the economy of single brush strokes, the use of open space as a compositional element, and the fine contrast between dense ink clusters and single sparse stems.
