Chickens and Asiatic Dayflowers

Chickens and Asiatic Dayflowers is a kachō-e, or bird-and-flower picture, designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1832 and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The sheet belongs to a small group of large-format bird and flower designs Hokusai produced in the early 1830s as a counterpart to his landscape series, extending the ambitions of Edo ukiyo-e beyond the established repertoire of actors, beauties, and famous places.

A rooster, hen, and chick are arranged in a tightly knit family group amid a flowering thicket of tsuyukusa, the Asiatic dayflower whose vivid blue petals had long furnished Japanese artists with a fugitive blue dye. Hokusai sets the white plumage of the cockerel against the cooler indigo and slate tones of the surrounding foliage, then accents the composition with the brilliant scarlet of the comb and wattles. The careful study of feather pattern, the calligraphic curl of the tail, and the alert attention of the hen toward her chick all signal Hokusai's lifelong interest in close observation of the natural world, an interest also evident in his printed and brushwork drawing manuals.

As a ukiyo-e print, this design participates in a tradition of auspicious imagery: roosters and dayflowers each carried positive associations in the visual culture of Edo, with cockerels linked to vigilance and good fortune and dayflowers signaling the dewy freshness of summer. Yet Hokusai pushes beyond conventional symbolism toward something closer to a naturalist's record, packing the picture plane with overlapping leaves and stems whose botanical accuracy rewards extended viewing. The print remains an important example of how Edo ukiyo-e absorbed and transformed earlier kachō-e traditions in the hands of its greatest mature designer.