Morning Glories, Pinks, and Maiden Flower, from the series "Seven Autumn Flowers in Moonlight"

Morning Glories, Pinks, and Maiden Flower is a kacho-e print by Utagawa Hiroshige from around 1830, designed for the series Seven Autumn Flowers in Moonlight and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The seven autumn flowers, aki no nanakusa, are a long-standing poetic grouping in Japanese tradition, originally drawn from Manyoshu verse and used to evoke the gentle melancholy of autumn. Hiroshige's series gives each member of the group its own poetic treatment under moonlight, of which this sheet, featuring morning glories, pinks (nadeshiko), and maiden flower (ominaeshi), is one example. The composition arranges the three plants in a tight vertical format, allowing curling vines and slender stems to ascend the sheet while the muted blue of a moonlit sky provides a unifying background. Restrained color and selective bokashi gradation focus attention on the structural elegance of leaves, petals, and stems. As a Utagawa Hiroshige design, the print exemplifies how he applied the same atmospheric sensibility seen in his Edo ukiyo-e landscape print compositions to small-scale botanical subjects, building a sense of mood from light, season, and selective detail. The Art Institute of Chicago documents the work as part of its Hiroshige holdings, where it sits among other kacho-e and meisho-e sheets. For collectors of Edo ukiyo-e, this design offers a precise example of how poetic literary tradition could be translated into commercial woodblock prints, deepening the cultural resonance of decorative botanical motifs. Morning Glories, Pinks, and Maiden Flower continues to inform research on the relationship between waka poetics and ukiyo-e, on Hiroshige's career-long engagement with seasonal symbolism, and on the broader role of bird-and-flower prints in nineteenth-century Japanese visual culture.