Keinen kachōgafu, fuyu no bu (Winter volume)

The Winter volume of the Keinen kachō gafu (fuyu no bu) is held by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and made available through the Library's open-access digital program as one of the most-consulted sources for studying Meiji-era natural-history woodblock printing. Published in Kyoto in 1892 by Nishimura Sōzaemon, with woodblock carving by Tanaka Jirokichi and color printing by Miki Jinzaburō and Tanaka Harubei, this volume closes the four-season cycle of the kachō gafu with thirty-four plates of winter imagery, several of them spanning double pages. Its motifs include the classic snow-and-bamboo subjects of Japanese painting, plum branches against snow on the eve of spring, mandarin ducks on cold streams, cranes in pine groves, hawks against bare branches, owls in winter trees, and small finches and sparrows in frozen reeds. Keinen's drawing in this volume foregrounds the close attention to bird anatomy that he had absorbed from his teacher Suzuki Hyakunen and ultimately from Maruyama Ōkyo's eighteenth-century shasei (sketching from life) practice, while the printing handles the muted winter palette — soft greys, off-whites, dark inks, and discreet color accents — with the kind of restrained gradation ([bokashi](/glossary/bokashi)) that the Meiji Kyoto block-printing trade had refined to a high level by the early 1890s. The Library of Congress copy (LCCN 2009615654) is widely consulted as a source for studying Meiji color woodblock printing at its technical peak.