Bird in a Cage

A bird in a cage — a long-standing kachō-ga (bird-and-flower) motif from the Edo print tradition — adapted to the octagonal album-leaf format of Shinsai's Rijksmuseum series (accession RP-P-1961-140). The composition centres on the suspended bamboo birdcage with its single small songbird perched within, the cage's geometry providing the principal structural lines of the print and the surrounding decorative ground filled in with patterns that pick up the colours used elsewhere in the album. The subject belongs to the elegant domestic-still-life branch of late-Edo ukiyo-e — the song-bird in its cage, the writing-table accoutrement, the lacquer tea utensil — that had been a Shibata-Zeshin studio specialty in lacquer painting since the 1860s and that Shinsai here translates into the colour-woodcut idiom. The black line-block carries the principal drawing of the cage and bird, with two or three additional colour blocks supplying the muted greens and browns characteristic of the album's restrained Meiji palette. The print measures approximately 223 by 287 millimetres on Japanese paper, is catalogued by the Rijksmuseum as item 109-32 in 'The age of Yoshitoshi: Japanese prints from the Meiji and Taishō periods', and is held under CC0 public domain.