Title page, from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life (Ikiutsushi yonjuhachiyo)

The title page to Nakayama Sūgakudō's Ikiutsushi yonjūhachiyō (Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life), dated 1859–1860 and published in Edo by Tsutaya Kichizō under the imprint Kōeidō, opens what is generally regarded as the most ambitious bird-and-flower series of the Bakumatsu period. The series title, written with the characters 生写 ("copying from life") followed by 四十八鷹 ("forty-eight hawks") in some impressions or with a broader bird designation in others, programmatically asserts the project's debt to Maruyama-Shijō sketching-from-life practice as filtered through the late-Hiroshige kachō-e tradition. Tsutaya Kichizō's Kōeidō imprint was one of the most reliable Edo publishers of high-quality color woodblock prints in the late 1850s and is the same firm that issued sets of Hiroshige's late landscape series; that an undocumented bird-and-flower specialist like Sūgakudō was given a forty-eight-plate run by Kōeidō indicates the seriousness with which his work was treated by the contemporary print trade. The Achenbach Foundation copy of the title page (FAMSF accession 1963.30.5551) is one of several institutional copies; printed in a restrained palette of black, indigo, and red against an unprinted ground, it functions as a frontispiece and bears the publisher's mark, the date, and the series title cartouche.