Snipe, Reeds, and Morning Glory, from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life

Snipe, Reeds, and Morning Glory is one of the most often-reproduced compositions from Nakayama Sūgakudō's 1859 Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life, pairing a snipe (shigi) wading among reeds with the trailing tendrils of a morning glory (asagao). Snipe in reeds is one of the canonical motifs of Japanese poetry, treated by Saigyō and many subsequent waka poets as the type-image of autumn dusk, while morning glory carries the contrary, summery association of the dew-fresh dawn; the pairing produces the kind of temporal compression characteristic of kachō-e, in which a single composition gestures at multiple seasonal moments at once. Sūgakudō's drawing of the snipe shows the close observation of plumage and standing posture that the series' Ikiutsushi ("copying from life") title programmatically claims, while the reeds are rendered with the long diagonals and asymmetric placement that the Hiroshige tradition had codified for waterside subjects. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco impression (Achenbach 1963.30.5553) was printed by Tsutaya Kichizō's Kōeidō imprint in Edo and demonstrates the high level of color registration and bokashi gradation that the firm's bird-and-flower production had reached by the late 1850s.