Preparing Food for a Nightingale, from the illustrated kyoka anthology "Men's Stamping Dance (Otoko toka)"

Preparing Food for a Nightingale, from the illustrated kyōka anthology Men's Stamping Dance (Otoko tōka), is a color woodblock print of about 1793 by Kitagawa Utamaro in the Art Institute of Chicago. Kyōka was a comic, sophisticated form of thirty-one-syllable verse popular among Edo's literati and amateur poets, and luxurious illustrated kyōka albums were produced in close collaboration with leading ukiyo-e artists for connoisseur audiences. The plate gathers around the gentle action of preparing food for a captive nightingale, the uguisu, a small songbird traditionally associated with early spring. Bird-keeping, the careful feeding and grooming of singing birds, was a widespread Edo pastime, and the activity in Utamaro's design draws together a quiet domestic moment with an elite recreational pursuit. The composition is built around a figure or pair of figures attending to a small cage or feeding implement, their poses and gestures depicted with the refined draughtsmanship that defines his Edo bijin-ga. Even within a kyōka album, where text and image are tightly interwoven, Utamaro brings his ukiyo-e command of line and his understanding of feminine presence to the page. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression is a useful reminder of his collaboration with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō on deluxe illustrated books, where Kitagawa Utamaro's bijin-ga sensibility was extended into a sustained dialogue with literature and humorous verse.