Titmouse and Girl

A young girl and a titmouse — the small chickadee-like bird familiar to Japanese gardens and woodlands — share the frame in this 1955 Senpan print, the child's interested attention and the bird's alert wariness creating a charming study in the natural curiosity that connects human beings and small wild animals. Senpan was drawn to children as subjects because they embodied the kind of direct, unselfconscious engagement with the world that he valued in all his figure work: they look at things without social performance, they respond with genuine feeling.