Japanese Bush Warbler and Flowering Plum (Ume ni uguisu)

This color woodblock print by Hasegawa Sadanobu II, dated before 1941, depicts the classic kachō-e pairing of a Japanese bush warbler (uguisu) with a flowering plum branch (ume) — one of the most enduring motifs in the bird-and-flower tradition of East Asian painting and printmaking. The uguisu, sometimes translated as Japanese nightingale, is associated above all with the moment of late winter passing into early spring: its distinctive song traditionally announces the warming season, and its appearance in plum trees coming into blossom carries strong seasonal resonance in Japanese waka poetry, where the pairing recurs from the Heian-period anthologies onward. Sadanobu II's drawing follows the Shijō habit, learned through his teacher Ueda Kōchō and through his own father's Shijō-derived practice, of building a kachō-e composition around a single closely observed bird, rendered with attention to feathering and posture, set against a flowering branch whose seasonal and literary associations supply the cultural depth of the image. The work was made in Osaka in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, exhibits the elaborate gradation (bokashi) and refined registration of mature Hasegawa-workshop printing, and survives in good color condition in the RISD Museum collection in Providence. Sadanobu II produced more than thirty bird-and-flower prints over his career, often adapting compositional ideas from Hiroshige, Sūgakudō Nakayama, and Kitagawa Utamaro for an Osaka audience and an emerging Western market for Japanese prints in the late Meiji and Taishō eras.