TWO BIRDS ON A BRANCH

Two Birds on a Branch, in the Harvard Art Museums, is a Hiroshige kacho-e in which the artist condenses the compositional discipline of his Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints onto a small portion of foliage. Two small songbirds are perched on a branch that traces a long diagonal from the lower right toward the upper left of the sheet, leaving large fields of empty paper that the audience would read as light or as undifferentiated atmosphere. The birds are drawn with quick, sure lines, their plumage worked up in graded color blocks, while the leaves and twigs of the branch are arranged with an asymmetry that recalls earlier Chinese bird-and-flower painting. Hiroshige's particular contribution to this old genre lay in his confidence in the woodblock medium itself: rather than imitating the brushy effects of ink painting, he allowed the keyblock and the color blocks to do work that brushed silk could never do, producing flatter, more graphic compositions easily reproduced in the dozens. The kacho prints sat at a different price point than the meisho landscapes and reached audiences who wanted decorative imagery for their homes; this small sheet probably hung as a household ornament before entering a Western collection and ultimately the Harvard Art Museums.