Chigusa no Hana, Hatsukoe (The Warbler's First Call, from the series A Thousand Kinds of Flowers)

Chigusa no Hana, Hatsukoe — "The Warbler's First Call," from a series titled A Thousand Kinds of Flowers (Chigusa no Hana, 千種の花) — is a color woodblock print (nishiki-e) of 1901 by Ikeda Terukata, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The print belongs to the earliest phase of Terukata's professional career, when he was still completing his training in the studio of Mizuno Toshikata (1866-1908) and entering the commercial print trade as a designer. The title couples a seasonal flower with the spring call of the uguisu (Japanese bush warbler), a classical poetic pairing in Japanese waka that linked the calendar of plant bloom to the year's earliest birdsong. The print's composition, treatment of female figure, and palette reflect Toshikata's transitional position between late-Edo ukiyo-e and the new nihonga of the Meiji era: a single woman in seasonal costume, refined line drawing in the manner of high-end Tokyo printing, and a restraint of figure and ground characteristic of the bijin-ga sensibility his pupils carried into the twentieth century. As an early-career sheet by Terukata it is a useful reference point for the formation of his mature style and for the broader Toshikata school's engagement with the older nishiki-e tradition in the years before the Bunten was established.