Rooster and Indian Strawberries

Rooster and Indian Strawberries is one of the most charming plates from Nakayama Sūgakudō's 1859 Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life, pairing a brightly colored rooster (niwatori) with the small white flowers and red fruit of Indian strawberry (hebi-ichigo, literally "snake strawberry"), a wild creeping plant common to the Japanese countryside. The rooster is one of the canonical farmyard subjects of Japanese kachō-e, associated both with the breaking dawn and with the iconography of the New Year and the rooster in the zodiacal cycle. Sūgakudō's treatment is naturalistic rather than emblematic, foregrounding the structure of the cock's tail feathers and the rendering of its comb against a restrained palette of red, indigo, and ochre. The Honolulu Museum of Art impression (accession 7847) was acquired through the museum's substantial early-twentieth-century holdings of Japanese prints and is one of several Sūgakudō plates preserved in the Honolulu collection — an important Pacific-coast counterpart to the better-known Boston and San Francisco Sūgakudō holdings.