Bull-headed Shrike and Bluebird with Saxifrage and Wild Strawberry (Mozu, ruri, yukinoshita, hebi-ichigo), from an untitled series of flowers and birds

Bull-headed Shrike and Bluebird with Saxifrage and Wild Strawberry is one of Katsushika Hokusai's bird-and-flower prints from his celebrated untitled "small flowers" series of around 1829. The composition shows a brown shrike (mozu) and a vivid blue ruri (perhaps an Asian blue robin), placed alongside the small white blossoms of saxifrage (yukinoshita) and the red fruit of wild strawberry (hebi-ichigo). Hokusai groups these four creatures and plants into a tight vertical composition that takes advantage of bokashi printing for the leaves and grounds, deep flat color for the birds, and the artist's signature elegant linework for stems and feathers. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the bold yet delicate color play characteristic of fine impressions of this kacho-e set. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, this image stands in a long East Asian tradition of bird-and-flower painting, but transposed into the relatively new medium of color woodblock printing using imported Prussian blue and other late-Edo pigments. Within Hokusai's catalogue it complements the landscape series of the late 1820s and 1830s by showing how the same compositional intelligence that organized the Mount Fuji prints could be deployed at the scale of a few square inches of plant and animal life. Such kacho-e were collected for their decorative beauty, their literary associations, and the sheer technical refinement they represented within the ukiyo-e print tradition.