Sparrow

Sparrow (Suzume) 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 in the years around 1900. The sparrow is among the most heavily worked subjects in the East Asian bird-and-flower tradition: the small, almost familiar bird of the village courtyard and the rice fields, painted in profile or in flight, served the kachō-e specialists of the Edo and Meiji periods as a kind of compositional touchstone — a subject so familiar that the painter's skill could be measured against the difficulty of saying anything new in it. Hōbun's handling resolves the bird in close observation of feather and posture, the small body resting on or just leaving a branch, with the restrained color and quiet background that distinguished his mature kachō-e production from the brighter decoration of the contemporary Tokyo specialists. The print belongs to the small-format bird series that the Osaka publisher Shima Art Co. issued from the late Meiji period through the inter-war decades, and surviving impressions document the wide international circulation of Hōbun's kachō-e through the Pacific Rim decorative-print market.