Nightingale on Willow Branch

Nightingale on Willow Branch is a hanging-scroll painting by Matsumura Keibun in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 36.100.36), depicting a nightingale (uguisu) perched on a flowering or fresh-leaved willow branch. The pairing is one of the canonical early-spring subjects of Japanese bird-and-flower painting: the uguisu, often called the Japanese bush warbler in English ornithology, is the first songbird of the year in Japanese poetry, its call associated with plum blossoms, willows, and the end of winter; the willow (yanagi) is its standard companion in the kachō-e tradition, prized for the supple lines of its hanging branches. Keibun's drawing is characteristically restrained: the bird is rendered with the close attention to feathering structure and to the angle of foot-on-branch that the Shijō school's shasei (sketching from life) practice demanded, the willow stems are placed in a long diagonal across the upper part of the scroll, and the background is left empty so that the composition reads as a small lyric image rather than a busy decorative scene. The painting is paired with the same museum's Bush Clover, Grass and Cricket (36.100.37) in a complementary pair of spring and autumn kachō-e by Keibun in the Metropolitan's collection.