Morning Glories

Morning Glories is a kacho-ga design by Utagawa Hiroshige dated to 1840 and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (object 88423). The composition concentrates on the climbing vines and trumpet-shaped flowers of the asagao, a plant whose name in Japanese literally means morning face and which was the subject of intense breeding and connoisseurship in late Edo. Hiroshige arranges the vines in a curving diagonal across the sheet, alternating open blossoms with curled buds and broad green leaves. The flowers are printed in saturated indigo and pale blue, with white reserves giving form to their throats and a touch of pink emphasizing the petals. The background is left clean, allowing the structure of the plant to read clearly against the unprinted ground. Although he is most widely associated with the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Hiroshige produced a steady body of bird-and-flower prints across his career, often in long narrow formats suited to album leaves or hanging arrangements. Morning Glories belongs to that tradition. The 1840s saw an expanding market in Edo for natural-history images, fed both by botanical interest and by the seasonal poetry that supplied so much of the city's visual culture. For collectors, this sheet is a clear example of Hiroshige's botanical work and rewards comparison with his snow-and-flower prints and bird studies of the same decade.