Birds and Flowers

Birds and Flowers, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and assigned a working date around 1790 in the museum's records (a date earlier than Eisen's documented activity and likely a cataloguing approximation), belongs to the kacho-ga genre of bird-and-flower prints that occupied a minor but consistent place in Keisai Eisen's output. While Eisen is best remembered for Edo bijin-ga and for his Kisokaido landscape contributions, he produced kacho-ga both as standalone prints and as small-format surimono throughout his career. The kacho-ga genre had its roots in Chinese ink-painting traditions imported through the Kano and Nanga schools, and Eisen's training under Kano Hakkeisai gave him both the technical vocabulary and the iconographic literacy to work in it. The composition typically pairs a single bird with a sprig of flowering plant — plum and warbler, sparrow and bamboo, hawk and pine — in a balanced vertical or horizontal arrangement that draws on classical poetic associations. The Met's holding of this Birds and Flowers print exemplifies that tradition without being one of Eisen's flagship designs; it occupies the same domestic decorative niche as the surimono kacho-ga produced by Hokusai, Hiroshige, and others of the same generation. The print would have been displayed in a tokonoma alcove or kept in a folding album, and it sits at a respectful remove from the more commercially driven bijin-ga and landscape series that dominated Eisen's working life.