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Your galleryMacaw on a pine branch
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Follow the pine bough up from the lower left to the macaw, then compare its smooth red feathers with the spiky bursts of pine needles around it.
Besides landscapes, Hiroshige designed pictures of birds on branches; the Art Institute traces his early pictures of this kind to Chinese scroll painting and the Kano school. Here a red macaw with blue and green wings grips a twisting pine bough, and two lines of Chinese verse stand in the pale sky. The tall, narrow format, otanzaku, shares its name with tanzaku, the narrow slips on which poems were written.
Color woodblock print; otanzaku · 37.8 × 16.7 cm · Art Institute of Chicago
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Macaw on a pine branch
- Artist
- Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重 Japanese, 1797-1858
- Date
- c. 1835
- Medium
- Color woodblock print; otanzaku
- Dimensions
- 37.8 × 16.7 cm (14 7/8 × 6 5/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of H. R. Warner
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.