Kingfisher on Lotus Plant

Kingfisher on Lotus Plant is a color woodblock print by Taki Katei, dated about 1880-1890, held by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (accession RP-P-1961-144) as part of an album of thirty-nine octagonal prints donated to the museum in 1961 by Mrs. L.J. Boddaert of Delft. The print measures 22.3 by 28.7 cm and is set inside the distinctive octagonal frame that gives the Rijksmuseum album its character — a format borrowed from late Edo and Meiji decorative prints that allowed senior nihonga and nanga painters to participate in the deluxe album-print trade alongside their formal painting practice. The pairing of a kingfisher with a lotus plant combines two of the standard subjects of the East Asian bird-and-flower tradition: the kingfisher (kawasemi), prized for its brilliant blue plumage and associated in Chinese painting with summer freshness and watery scenes, and the lotus, charged with Buddhist purity and seasonal symbolism. Katei's treatment in the small print format compresses into a single octagonal field the close observational drawing of leaves, water, and feather that defined his large-scale paintings on silk.