River Sparrow and Kuchinashi Flowers (Kawara hiwa kuchinashi), No. 40 from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life

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.