Picture Album of Various Birds (Shūchō gafu)

Picture Album of Various Birds (Shūchō gafu, 聚鳥畫譜) is the canonical three-volume color woodblock-printed bird book by Numata Kashū, published in Tokyo in the first month of Meiji 18 (1885). It collects more than 100 plates of Japanese birds shown with their characteristic plants and habitats, from the small songbirds of the garden and rice field — sparrows, buntings, wrens, finches, bulbuls — to the larger waterfowl and raptors of the marsh, coast, and mountain — mandarin ducks, demoiselle cranes, white-fronted geese, golden eagles, and kites. Kashū's drawing combines the ornithological precision absorbed from the Maruyama-Shijō shasei tradition of sketching from life with the decorative, seasonally weighted compositional habits of the older Edo kachō-e (bird-and-flower) genre, while the multi-block color printing carries the kind of subtle gradations (bokashi) and registered detail that the high-end Tokyo block-printing trade had refined to a technical peak by the 1880s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's copy (JIB2) is one of the few surviving complete three-volume sets in a major Western collection, having been acquired through the Rogers Fund in 1918; the publishing workshop that produced the album went out of business shortly after issuing it, and the original sets are now sufficiently rare that individual plates are far more commonly encountered than complete bound copies.