Pheasants under Branch of Peach Blossoms

This Art Institute of Chicago chuban-format bird-and-flower print, attributed to circa 1764 to 1775, depicts a pair of pheasants beneath a flowering peach branch. The peach blossom, with its early-spring associations, was a stock subject in the Chinese-derived kacho-ga vocabulary that Koryusai inherited and Edo-ized, and the male pheasant's iridescent plumage offered woodblock designers a virtuoso opportunity for layered color registration. Koryusai uses the chuban (mid-size) format to balance the two birds against the diagonal of the branch, giving the composition a stable but slightly off-center axis. The print belongs to the substantial body of kacho-ga that Koryusai produced in parallel with his bijin-ga during the late 1760s and early 1770s, and it shows the same careful attention to subtle color gradation, blossom-by-blossom registration, and quiet decorative weight that characterizes his finest figural prints of the period.