Sparrows

Sparrows (Murasuzume) 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 shows a group of sparrows together rather than a single bird — the canonical murasuzume (flocking sparrows) subject that runs through East Asian bird-and-flower painting from the Song dynasty onward as a standard image of the autumn harvest, when the small birds gather to feed on the ripening rice. The grouping carries a strong set of associations in the Japanese pictorial vocabulary: plenty, the abundance of the harvest, and the immediate sensory experience of late summer and early autumn in the rural Japanese landscape. Hōbun's handling combines the close drawing of the birds' postures — heads turned, wings half-spread, beaks reaching — with a restrained background and quiet color that distinguish his work from the brighter, more heavily decorated kachō-e of the contemporary Tokyo specialists. The print belongs to the body of small-format bird subjects that the Osaka publisher Shima Art Co. issued from the late Meiji period through the 1930s for the international decorative-print market, and surviving impressions are now held in many North American and European private collections.