White-Fronted Goose, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)
聚鳥畫譜 — 真雁
by Numata Kashū
- Date:
- 1885
- Medium:
- Color woodblock print from a book; ink and color on paper
聚鳥畫譜 — 真雁
by Numata Kashū
White-Fronted Goose depicts the magan (greater white-fronted goose, Anser albifrons), a large grey-brown goose distinguished by the white patch at the base of its bill that gives the species its English and Japanese names. The white-fronted goose is one of the principal migratory waterfowl of the Japanese winter, arriving in large flocks at the Izu-numa wetland and other northern Honshū staging areas from Arctic breeding grounds; the rasping call of overhead skeins of magan was for centuries one of the auditory signatures of the late-autumn and early-winter Japanese rural landscape. Kashū's plate in the Shūchō gafu (1885) gives the bird the kind of grounded standing posture that allows the album to show the structure of the goose's body, beak, and feet with naturalist's clarity, while also drawing on the long Japanese poetic association of arriving and departing geese with seasonal transit and human longing for absent travelers. The plate sits within the album's wider treatment of Japanese waterfowl, balancing the mandarin duck plate with a study of a much larger, more austerely colored species.
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
White-Fronted Goose, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu) (聚鳥畫譜 — 真雁) was created by Numata Kashū (沼田荷舟) in 1885.
White-Fronted Goose, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu) depicts birds & flowers.
