Butcherbird, Oak Tree and Camellia

Butcherbird, Oak Tree and Camellia is a plate from Nakayama Sūgakudō's 1859 Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life depicting a butcherbird (a Western popular name for the shrike, mozu) perched on the branch of an oak tree alongside winter-flowering camellia blossoms. The composition is closely related to the better-known Shrike, Withered Oak, Water Camellia plate (No. 38 of the series) and demonstrates the way in which Sūgakudō and his publisher Tsutaya Kichizō built variant designs around a single ornithological subject, giving collectors multiple compositional treatments of the same bird. The shrike's habit of impaling its small prey on thorns earned it the Western popular name "butcherbird," reflected in the Honolulu Museum's cataloguing of the print; in Japanese poetic tradition, by contrast, the mozu is a more neutral autumn-and-winter songbird associated with bare branches and the sharp cold of late November. The Honolulu Museum impression (accession 7859), printed in Edo by Kōeidō, preserves the original 1859 color registration and the careful bokashi gradation that distinguishes Sūgakudō's bird studies from earlier and more conventional Edo kachō-e.