River Sparrow and Kuchinashi Flowers (Kawara hiwa kuchinashi), No. 40 from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life
河原鶸 梔子
- Date:
- 1859
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print
河原鶸 梔子
River Sparrow and Kuchinashi Flowers (Kawara hiwa kuchinashi), No. 40 from Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life, pairs a small river finch with the dense white flowers and dark-green leaves of the gardenia (kuchinashi), one of the most fragrant of Japanese summer flowering shrubs. The pairing is characteristic of Nakayama Sūgakudō's program in the 1859 series: a bird identified by its Japanese name (kawarahiwa, the river greenfinch or oriental greenfinch) paired with a specific named plant rather than a generic floral setting, so that the plate functions both as a small lyric image and as a natural-history identification. The Japanese name kuchinashi (literally "mouthless") is the source of a long literary tradition of puns in classical poetry, where the flower stands in for the figure of the silent lover. Sūgakudō's composition uses the typical late-Edo kachō-e vertical format, with the bird perched at the upper register and the flowers occupying the lower two-thirds of the print. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco copy (Achenbach Foundation) preserves the original 1859 Kōeidō printing.
生写四十八鷹
1859–60
Color woodblock print
鶺鴒 水仙
1859
Color woodblock print
百舌 枯柏 冬椿
1859
Color woodblock print
写生四十八鷹画帖
1859 (later edition with French/English colophon)
Album of color woodblock prints
River Sparrow and Kuchinashi Flowers (Kawara hiwa kuchinashi), No. 40 from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life (河原鶸 梔子) was created by Nakayama Sūgakudō (中山嵩岳堂) in 1859.
River Sparrow and Kuchinashi Flowers (Kawara hiwa kuchinashi), No. 40 from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life depicts birds & flowers.
