A Golden Pheasant amid Snow-Covered Bamboo on a Steep Hillside

A Golden Pheasant amid Snow-Covered Bamboo on a Steep Hillside is one of the larger and more elaborate kacho-ga designs by Utagawa Hiroshige, dating to 1835 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago (object 26219). The composition is built around the brilliantly colored male golden pheasant, perched among bamboo stems heavy with new snow on what appears to be a precipitous slope. The bird's long tail trails downward into the lower part of the sheet, and the curve of its body is carefully matched against the angled bamboo. Snow is rendered partly through unprinted paper and partly with shaped reserves on the bamboo leaves, while the pheasant's body uses a palette of deep red, ocher, blue, and black that exploits the full register of color printing the woodblock medium then allowed. Although Utagawa Hiroshige is best known for the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, his bird-and-flower designs from the 1830s show him working at the upper end of the genre, in direct competition with painters such as Kano- and Shijo-school masters. The combination of a flamboyantly colored bird, austere winter bamboo, and a steep tilted ground plane gives the print a strong decorative impact. For collectors, the sheet is among the most reproduced of his nature studies and a good example of how he stretched the conventions of kacho-ga toward landscape feeling.