Copper Pheasant (Yamadori) and White Wagtail (Sekirei), detached page from the book Myriad Birds: A Kyōka Competition (Momo chidori kyōka awase)

Copper Pheasant (Yamadori) and White Wagtail (Sekirei), dated 1789 in the Harvard Art Museums record, is a detached page from the deluxe kyoka album Momo chidori kyoka awase (Myriad Birds: A Kyoka Competition). The book is among the most celebrated kyoka ehon of the late Edo period, pairing poems by amateur kyoka practitioners with carefully composed bird and flower images designed by Kitagawa Utamaro. This page focuses on the copper pheasant, a forest bird whose long tail offered Utamaro a chance to extend his line across the sheet, and the white wagtail, whose graphic body and tail movement provided a quieter counterpoint. As ukiyo-e, the work demonstrates how the floating-world print could turn from urban figures to natural history without losing its design sophistication, supported by the deluxe printing typical of bibliophile albums. Although the album is far from Edo bijin-ga in subject matter, it shares with Utamaro's beauty prints an attentiveness to balance, rhythm and tactile surface. The detached page lets modern viewers appreciate the original sheet's intimate scale and the subtle handling of color that the book's production allowed. Within Utamaro's broader career, Momo chidori is sometimes cited as a moment of expansion, in which the artist proved his command of subjects far beyond the Yoshiwara. The Harvard impression remains a valuable reference for late-eighteenth-century kyoka publishing and for Utamaro's place within the broader artistic culture that surrounded it.