Floating Sleep - Winter Birds

Floating Sleep - Winter Birds, the Harvard Art Museums' 1962 impression of Hatsuyama Shigeru's celebrated print Ukine no fuyu dori (https://[ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org/image/harvard/HUAM-CARP06234), is one of the artist's most contemplative late kachō-e (bird-and-flower) works. The composition shows a small group of waterbirds at rest, their bodies simplified into rounded shapes that float across muted passages of blue and grey, with subtle tonal variation suggesting cold water and a dimmed winter sky. Rather than describe a specific scene, Hatsuyama uses the print to evoke a state — the suspended attention of creatures asleep on moving water — and the title Ukine no fuyu dori captures that emotional register precisely. The print belongs to a particularly admired group of Hatsuyama's mature kachō-e, in which the visual economy he had honed as a children's-book illustrator is turned toward quietly meditative imagery for adult viewers. As a senior figure in the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) movement — a member of Onchi Kōshirō's Ichimokukai (First Thursday Society) since 1939 and of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai since 1944 — Hatsuyama designed, carved, and printed each impression himself, in keeping with the movement's foundational claim that every print should be a personal expression rather than a collaborative reproduction. The Harvard Art Museums impression is one of several institutional copies of this print, and comparison with the Art Institute of Chicago impression of the same subject reveals how Hatsuyama tuned individual sheets in response to paper and ink. For collectors and students of Hatsuyama Shigeru, the 1962 Floating Sleep - Winter Birds is a representative late masterwork, demonstrating how the artist's lifelong fondness for accessible imagery could carry, in his maturity, a profound stillness.