Bairei hyakuchō gafu (Three Volumes)

Bairei hyakuchō gafu (Three Volumes), held by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated 1884, preserves the complete three-volume set of Kono Bairei's signature illustrated album, here gathered under the Sky-Earth-People tripartite organization of the publisher Okura Magobei's Kyoto edition. The 1884 issue extends and refines the program first set out in the 1881 first edition, adding species and revising pairings as Bairei drew on his accumulated sketchbooks. Each opening pairs a single species — sparrow, mejiro, kingfisher, hawk, woodpecker, heron, jay, swallow — with a sparse seasonal setting of plum, bamboo, pine, reed, or rocky bank, rendered with the brushed ink line and graded color that mark Bairei's Kyoto Shijo school training under Nakajima Raisho and Shiokawa Bunrin. Cut by leading Kyoto block-cutters working with Bairei's drawings and printed on absorbent washi in the traditional fukurotoji binding, the set mimics brush-on-silk effects through delicate gradation and restrained registration rather than the flatter palettes of contemporary Edo ukiyo-e. As the dominant Kyoto Shijo school teacher of his generation, Bairei used the hyakuchō gafu albums to consolidate decades of bird sketches into a single ordered survey, and the 1884 three-volume set is the document that fixed his program for both domestic and export markets. The Art Institute of Chicago catalogues the set (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/231127) within its substantial Japanese illustrated book holdings, where Bairei hyakuchō gafu functions as a benchmark example of Meiji nihonga book illustration. For Kono Bairei specifically, the 1884 set represents the maturation of his Kyoto Shijo school discipline into a public-facing reference work consulted by painters, naturalists, and collectors well into the twentieth century.