Flowers, Birds

Flowers, Birds, produced by Hatsuyama Shigeru in 1953 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (https://[ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org/image/honolulu/7644), is a quietly accomplished entry in the artist's postwar reworking of the kachō-e (bird-and-flower) tradition. The composition arranges blooms and small birds across the sheet in a flat, decorative pattern, with each element treated as a designed shape rather than a naturalistic study. Color is laid down in soft, slightly granular fields that suggest the absorbency of [washi](/glossary/washi) paper, while the contours are drawn with the disciplined economy Hatsuyama developed during his years as a magazine and book illustrator. The print's tone is warm and contemplative, in keeping with the artist's broader postwar practice; having stepped back from commercial illustration in the late 1930s rather than produce wartime propaganda for children, he devoted himself in the postwar period to creating prints that offered viewers — and the children they served — gentle, restorative imagery. As a member of Onchi Kōshirō's Ichimokukai (First Thursday Society) and the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai, Hatsuyama worked firmly within the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) tradition, designing, carving, and printing each sheet himself. For students of mid-twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, Flowers, Birds offers a particularly accessible example of how the kachō-e idiom — central to Japanese visual culture for centuries — could be carried forward by a sōsaku-hanga artist whose deepest training had come from the world of children's literature.