The Star-Lovers Meeting on the Bridge of Birds
- Date:
- 1880 (page 6, Trübner edition 1887)
- Medium:
- Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York
Page six of Griffis's 'Japanese Fairy World' is given to the Tanabata legend of the weaver-princess Orihime and the herdsman Hikoboshi, separated annually across the Milky Way and reunited on the seventh night of the seventh month when a flock of magpies links their wings into a bridge across the celestial river. Ozawa Nankoku composes the scene as a pair of figures meeting near the centre of the sheet on a softly arcing band of birds, with the river of stars suggested as a wash of horizontal lines behind them. The lovers' robes fall in the long flowing diagonals familiar from late-Edo bijinga drawing, and the magpies are reduced almost to a pattern of overlapping shapes — a solution that survives the translation into wood-engraving better than a fully detailed Japanese keyblock would. Henry W. Troy's New York cut renders the figures with smooth white outlines against a dark sky, and the engraving's tight hatching has been used to define the river of stars rather than to model the bodies. The result is closer to a tonal print than a Japanese line print, but the underlying drawing — the elegant turn of the woman's head, the planted weight of the herdsman's foot on the central magpie — is recognisably the work of a Tokyo-trained brush draughtsman.
1880 (page 262, Trübner edition 1887)
Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York
1880 (page 150, Trübner edition 1887)
Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York
1880 (frontispiece, Trübner edition 1887)
Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York
1880 (page 206, Trübner edition 1887)
Wood-engraved book illustration after an original brush-and-ink drawing by Ozawa Nankoku of Tokyo; engraving by Henry W. Troy, New York
Woodblock print
![Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)" by Kawase Hasui](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/d0960668-1e73-339a-b182-fb995a54bff0/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
1947
Color woodblock print; oban
1926
Color woodblock print; oban
1930
Color woodblock print; oban
The Star-Lovers Meeting on the Bridge of Birds was created by Ozawa Nankoku (小沢南谷) in 1880 (page 6, Trübner edition 1887).
The Star-Lovers Meeting on the Bridge of Birds depicts bridges.