”Pigeon in Flight and Blossoming Cherry Tree”

Pigeon in Flight and Blossoming Cherry Tree is a Japanese woodblock kacho-ga, or bird-and-flower print, attributed to Ohara Koson and dated 1931 in the working brief. By that date the artist, who had been born in 1877 in Kanazawa and trained in nihonga under Suzuki Kason, had largely transitioned to publishing under the names Shoson and Hoson, primarily through Watanabe Shozaburo, the central publisher of the shin-hanga movement. The composition unites a pigeon in flight with a blossoming cherry tree, an iconic seasonal pairing of spring bird and spring flower that belongs to the deeply rooted kacho-ga tradition rather than to the bijin-ga or landscape categories that other shin-hanga artists made central to their practice. Koson's bird-and-flower designs typically isolate one or two birds in a precisely observed plant setting, the foreground organized around the diagonal of a branch or the tension between a bird's flight and a stationary blossom. The technical execution depended on Watanabe's well-known carvers and printers, who used the gradations and clean color separations that the shin-hanga publishing system had refined for its predominantly export-driven market. The print belongs to the second peak of Koson's career, when he had largely dropped the earlier Koson signature and was producing the Shoson-era bird-and-flower prints that have since become his best-known body of work. The impression discussed here is documented through the Artsy listing on the secondary market (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/ohara-koson-pigeon-in-flight-and-blossoming-cherry-tree), which preserves a record of the design under the artist's name.