Blue and Red Macaws

Blue and Red Macaws, held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is a color woodblock print attributed to Katsukawa Shunkō that depicts two parrots in a relatively unusual subject for the Katsukawa school. Bird-and-flower prints (kachō-e) were a recognized genre within ukiyo-e, but they were generally associated with Hokusai, Hiroshige, and specialist bird-and-flower artists rather than with the actor-print specialists of the Katsukawa lineage. The presence of macaws — birds native to the Americas — points to one of the more curious dimensions of late Edo visual culture: the period's fascination with exotic foreign animals and objects that arrived through the Dutch trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki. Imported parrots were rare luxuries of the wealthiest collectors, and depictions of foreign birds gave Edo print designers an opportunity to demonstrate technical virtuosity with brilliant color and unusual ornithological detail. The Art Institute of Chicago's catalog dates the work to the early twentieth century, which suggests it may be a posthumous edition or a re-cut printing from later blocks; original Shunkō-era impressions of his designs are increasingly rare and confirmed early printings are highly prized. The print remains a useful document of the Katsukawa school's range and of the persistence of Shunkō's designs in later commercial editions.