Wagtail and Narcissus (Sekirei suisen), No. 23 from the series Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life

Wagtail and Narcissus (Sekirei suisen), No. 23 from Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life, exemplifies the encyclopedic logic of Nakayama Sūgakudō's 1859 series: a single bird closely observed and identified, paired with a seasonally appropriate plant carrying classical literary associations. The Japanese wagtail (sekirei) is a small black-and-white waterside bird associated in Japanese poetry with the Kojiki account of Izanagi and Izanami — the bird that taught the primal pair to mate by the motion of its tail — and so carries one of the oldest mythological references in the kachō-e repertoire. The narcissus (suisen), a winter-flowering bulb introduced from China, is associated with the New Year season and with the literati ideal of pure-mindedness in cold weather. Sūgakudō pairs the two against an unprinted ground in the ōban tate-e (vertical) format with the precise color registration, blind embossing, and graduated washes that distinguish the Kōeidō imprint's late-1850s production. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco copy (Achenbach 1963.30.5554) is part of the substantial donation that brought the Achenbach Foundation's set of the series into a major American institution.