Harvesting the Flower by the Water, or Inaose, from the series "The Story of Three Birds (Sanchoden)"

Harvesting the Flower by the Water, or Inaose, 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 belongs to the strand of Edo ukiyo-e in which a literary or folkloric framework — three birds, each one keyed to a different scene — gives a sequence of prints internal coherence while leaving each sheet free to develop its own pictorial argument. In this design, the bird Inaose, an evocative name combining notions of rice ears and the back of a fish or beast, presides over a scene in which a figure crouches at the water's edge to harvest a flower. Eisen draws the bend of the body, the gathered kimono, and the reach of an arm with the linear assurance he brought to his bijin-ga, while the surrounding reeds and water are described with a few well-judged strokes that allow the printed ground to do much of the atmospheric work. As a surimono, the print would have circulated within a kyoka poetry circle, and the inscriptions distributed across the sheet would have linked the depicted moment to a verse that played on the bird's name. Eisen's selective use of metallic pigments and blind embossing gives the petals, water, and feathered wing a tactile presence that justifies the deluxe commission. The Art Institute's surviving sheet preserves a piece of evidence for how Edo's poetry coteries and woodblock workshops collaborated on small thematic series, and for how Eisen, beyond his celebrated bijin-ga, could carry an emblematic seasonal program with apparent ease.