Flowering Plum and Birds

Flowering Plum and Birds is a leaf from the 1873 Mori Kansai album in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (accession 2001.16K). The plum (ume) is, in classical Japanese terms, the flower of early spring, blossoming before the cherry on bare branches against winter air, and is associated with poetic endurance and with the scholar's virtues in the Chinese painting tradition that the Mori-Kishi school had absorbed. Kansai pairs the plum branch with small birds — characteristically observed in posture and feathering, in the Mori-Kishi naturalist manner — set against the album silk. A companion leaf (2001.16L) carries a related composition. Signed and dated 1873, the leaf belongs to the substantial corpus of Kansai bird-and-flower work that places him in a continuous line with the kachō-e practice of his Maruyama-Shijō contemporaries in Kyoto.