No. 401 (girl with bird on her shoulder)

Made in 1960 and printed from an edition of thirty (this impression numbered 26/30), No. 401 (girl with bird on her shoulder) develops the wide-eyed-child subject of Ikeda Shūzō's earlier numbered prints by adding the second motif — a small bird — that, alongside flowers, dolls, and insects, supplied the iconographic register of his mature work. The image, on Japanese hosho paper, again presents a single child as the central figure, with the large dark eyes that are the artist's most recognizable signature, and adds a small bird perched on her shoulder. The composition is built up from clean colour fields against the deliberately exposed cherrywood grain — the long horizontal lines of the plate are allowed to print directly through face, garment, and ground, supplying the textural atmosphere that integrates the figure into the wood rather than setting her against neutral ink. The print is signed in white ink at the lower right of the image and editioned, dated, and titled in pencil in the lower margin, in the manner standard for Ikeda's self-published woodblocks of the period. As a dated example from 1960, No. 401 marks the moment when the standardized vocabulary of children with bird, flower, and insect attributes — the imagery for which Ikeda would become widely known in the high-growth Shōwa decades — was fully in place.