Nuthatch on a Flowering Cherry Tree

Nuthatch on a Flowering Cherry Tree is the opening leaf of the 1873 Mori Kansai album in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (accession 2001.16A). The composition pairs the nuthatch — a small forest bird closely associated in Japanese bird painting with bark-foraging on pine, oak, and cherry — with a flowering cherry branch, the most quintessentially Japanese of all spring subjects. The combination places the leaf in the long kachō-e tradition of pairing a single closely observed bird with a seasonally specific flowering branch, in the manner that the Maruyama-Shijō and Mori-Kishi schools had codified through generations of sketching-from-life practice. As the opening leaf of the fifteen-leaf album, the subject anchors the cycle in spring before the album proceeds through other seasonal and figural subjects. Signed and dated 1873.