Plovers Flying Across a River above Snow-Laden Reeds (Fuyu no Kawa), from the series Worlds of Things (Momoyogusa)

Plovers Flying Across a River above Snow-Laden Reeds (Fuyu no Kawa, 'Winter River') is a colour woodblock print from Momoyogusa (Flowers of a Hundred Worlds), the three-volume orihon design album published in Kyoto in 1909-10 by Yamada Unsōdō and designed by Kamisaka Sekka (1866-1942). The Art Institute of Chicago's impression (127733) names the print's assistant block-cutter Usudō alongside Sekka, giving an unusually direct record of the late-Meiji Kyoto print workshop. The plate is one of the most reproduced images of the series: a flight of plovers (chidori) scattered across the upper register against snow-laden reeds bending over a winter river, the composition stripped to a few flat planes of ink, white, and pale colour against an embossed ground. The motif is among the oldest in Rimpa's working vocabulary — plovers and waves had been a defining subject of Sōtatsu and Kōrin painting two centuries earlier — and Sekka's plate restates it with the spare graphic clarity that distinguishes Momoyogusa from its historical sources. The blockcutter credit and the printing's many-block colour and karazuri effects together document the technical apparatus of late-Meiji Kyoto colour woodblock at its most refined.