Orange Parrot

Orange Parrot is a color woodblock print after Kikuchi Hōbun's original drawing, published in the Shima Art Co. kachō-e edition of small-format bird prints. The composition is unusual within the canonical kachō-e tradition for its choice of the parrot — an imported bird not native to the Japanese landscape — and reflects the more catholic vocabulary of subjects that the late Meiji and Taishō kachō-e specialists developed as the genre expanded beyond the strictly Japanese seasonal birds of the Edo tradition. The parrot is rendered in profile in the close observational manner that distinguished Hōbun's mature kachō-e production, with attention to the bright plumage and the curved beak that distinguish parrots from the small native songbirds that constituted the bulk of his bird production. The print measures approximately 10 × 7⅜ inches, the standard small-format kachō-e dimension of the Shima Art Co. series. Surviving impressions are now held in private and institutional collections and document the international diffusion of Hōbun's kachō-e through the Pacific Rim decorative-print market of the inter-war decades.