Kingfisher and Chinese Bellflowers

Kingfisher and Chinese Bellflowers, dating to about 1830, belongs to the early phase of Utagawa Hiroshige's career in which he refined the kacho-e, or bird-and-flower print, alongside the developing landscape print mode that would later dominate his reputation. The composition pairs a brilliant blue kingfisher on a curving branch with a spray of Chinese bellflowers (kikyo), one of the seven autumn grasses of classical Japanese poetry. The bellflower's deep purple blossoms, with their five-pointed stars, were one of the most economical tests for the colorist of an Edo ukiyo-e print, and their precise registration here is exemplary. Hiroshige adapts the vertical short oban format to leave broad areas of cream-toned paper as empty sky, with a single seventeen-syllable haiku inscribed at the upper right, integrating poem and image in the manner of literati painting. Bird-and-flower prints by Hiroshige circulated in smaller editions and were prized by collectors then as now for the precision of their carving and the delicacy of the color blocks. This impression is preserved in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which holds an unusually deep set of his early kacho-e designs.