Canary and Peony, from an untitled series

Canary and Peony comes from Katsushika Hokusai's celebrated untitled "small flowers" series of bird-and-flower prints, designed around 1829. The set is among the most refined kacho-e (bird-and-flower) projects in all of Edo ukiyo-e, pairing carefully observed birds with single sprays of seasonal flowers in tightly designed compositions. Here a yellow canary perches above a single brilliant red peony, the bird's tilted head and the blossom's full corolla creating a tense diagonal across the sheet, balanced by the leaves and stem trailing into the lower margin. Hokusai uses the artificial decorative quality of the canary - a foreign cage bird whose vivid yellow plumage stood out from native species - to play off the famously sumptuous peony, which carries associations with wealth and aristocratic taste in East Asian art. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this impression. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, Canary and Peony showcases the level of refinement that the kacho-e genre had reached in Hokusai's hands: graduated bokashi printing on the petals, subtle embossing on the bird's plumage, and a strong understanding of how a few elements can carry a whole image when placed against a deep, uncluttered ground. Within Hokusai's broader oeuvre, prints like this one complement the famous landscape series by showing how thoroughly he had mastered the entire formal vocabulary of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock printing, from the panoramic to the intimate.