No. 39, Plovers and Dry Reeds (Chidori kareashi), from the series Forty-eight Hawks Drawn from Life

No. 39, Plovers and Dry Reeds (Chidori kareashi) from the series Shō utsushi yonjū-hachi taka (Forty-eight Hawks Drawn from Life — an alternate title under which Nakayama Sūgakudō's 1859 series circulated in Western collections) pairs a pair of plovers (chidori) with the dry reeds of the late autumn or early winter shoreline. Plovers in dry reeds is one of the most stable motifs in the Japanese poetic and pictorial tradition, treated in the Hyakunin isshu and innumerable later waka as a type-image of cold seacoast solitude, and it is one of the subjects most closely associated with Hiroshige's mid-century kachō-e production from which Sūgakudō descends. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston copy was acquired through the William Sturgis Bigelow gift of 1911, which brought hundreds of nineteenth-century Japanese prints into the museum's collection following Bigelow's years of residence in Japan (1882–1889) as a student of Okakura Kakuzō and a participant in the early phase of the international collecting of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e). The impression preserves the careful registration of the original Tsutaya Kichizō / Kōeidō issue.