Feeding the Myriad Bird (Momochidori), from the series "The Story of Three Birds (Sanchoden)"

Feeding the Myriad Bird (Momochidori), from the series The Story of Three Birds (Sanchoden), is a Keisai Eisen surimono catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to 1801. The series uses a trio of named birds to thread three independent compositions together, and this sheet is dedicated to the momochidori — literally the bird of a thousand or a myriad — a poetic name for plovers or, more broadly, the flocked shorebirds celebrated in classical Japanese verse. Eisen pictures a young woman bending to scatter feed across a band of sand or marsh where the birds gather, their crisscrossing flight forming a small flickering pattern at the water's edge. The figure is drawn with the long, slightly mannered contour line of Eisen's mature bijin-ga; her kimono falls in fluid pleats that justify the surimono's careful use of metallic pigments, while the birds themselves are rendered with characteristic Edo ukiyo-e shorthand — a few quick strokes for each body and an inked-in eye to give it life. As with the rest of the Sanchoden series, kyoka verses arranged around the figures would have anchored the picture in the poetry circle that commissioned the set. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the sheet as part of its substantial holdings of Eisen's surimono, where it sits alongside companion prints in the series. Though Eisen is most often celebrated for his portraits of fashionable women, the Sanchoden prints show how comfortably he could embed bijin-ga figures within an emblematic, bird-centered structure designed to satisfy literary as well as visual appetites.