Parakeet on the Branch of a Cherry Tree

Isoda Koryusai designed this kacho-ga of a parakeet perched on a flowering cherry branch around 1772, a few years after he assumed his position as the leading Harunobu successor in the Edo ukiyo-e workshops. The composition is a hashira-e, a narrow pillar print made to be hung on the wooden uprights of an interior post, and Koryusai is generally credited with raising this challenging vertical format to its highest level of design. The pillar print's roughly seventy by twelve centimeter proportions force the artist to engineer the entire image around a single tall axis, and Koryusai answers the constraint here by setting the cherry branch on a strong diagonal that crosses the column from upper right to lower left, with the parakeet's body anchoring the centre and the trailing blossoms releasing the eye downward. The bird-and-flower subject draws on the kacho-e tradition that ran in parallel with bijin-ga through the An'ei and Tenmei years, but Koryusai's handling, his careful registration, the use of gauffrage to model the petals, and the restrained blue and pink palette, identifies the design as fully in the orbit of late eighteenth-century nishiki-e. The Victoria and Albert Museum copy is one of the better surviving impressions of a format that, because of its function as a wall hanging, was easily damaged or discarded. The print is a model example of why Koryusai is now ranked as the most accomplished hashira-e designer of the period.