Japanese Bunting and Plum Tree, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)
聚鳥畫譜 — 野路子と梅
by Numata Kashū
- Date:
- 1885
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print from a book; ink and color on paper
聚鳥畫譜 — 野路子と梅
by Numata Kashū
Japanese Bunting and Plum Tree pairs the noji-ko (Japanese yellow bunting, an East Asian songbird) with the flowering branches of ume (Japanese plum, Prunus mume), the small white or pink five-petaled blossom that opens in late January or February while snow is still on the ground and that has anchored the iconography of early Japanese spring for more than a thousand years of waka, haikai, and East Asian painting. The plum is one of the most heavily coded motifs of the Japanese seasonal calendar — Sugawara no Michizane's plum at Dazaifu, the Three Friends of Winter, the long association of plum blossom with scholarly elegance and quiet endurance — and Kashū's pairing of it with the yellow bunting puts a relatively obscure songbird into one of the most exalted seasonal-poetic contexts available to the Japanese painter. The plate in the Shūchō gafu (1885) shows the bird in a clinging posture on a flowering twig, with the structure of its short beak and yellowish underparts carefully described, the kind of small composition that the album uses repeatedly to balance its larger raptor and waterfowl plates.
聚鳥畫譜 — 鵯と柊
1885
Color woodblock print from a book; ink and color on paper
聚鳥畫譜 — 鵯と浜茄子
1885
Color woodblock print from a book; ink and color on paper
聚鳥畫譜 — 蒿雀と葦
1885
Color woodblock print from a book; ink and color on paper
聚鳥畫譜 — 鷲と荒海
1885
Color woodblock print from a book; ink and color on paper
Japanese Bunting and Plum Tree, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu) (聚鳥畫譜 — 野路子と梅) was created by Numata Kashū (沼田荷舟) in 1885.
Japanese Bunting and Plum Tree, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu) depicts birds & flowers.
