Flowers, Birds

Flowers, Birds, produced by Hatsuyama Shigeru in 1953 and held by the Honolulu Museum of Art (https://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 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.