A landscape shows a place. A nature painting moves in close and makes an animal or a plant the subject.
Getting that close is the hard part. Painters work in front of the living thing, from a dead specimen or a cut branch, or from memory and other pictures.
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How These Were Chosen
Two tests got a picture in: the animals and plants stand on their own, or the landscape around them is only a backdrop.
12. Utagawa Hiroshige, Blue Bird and Roses (1830s)
A bird with a deep blue back and a gray underside dives head first into a branch of roses. Its tail points up to the upper left. Its beak reaches down into a cluster of flowers.
The roses rise along the right side, from half-open buds near the bottom to full blooms around the bird. A poem in flowing script runs down the bare paper at the upper left.
Utagawa Hiroshige designed the print in the 1830s. His city was Edo, now called Tokyo.
The sheet is tall and narrow, nearly three times as high as it is wide. Hiroshige made a group of bird-and-flower prints in this upright format for an Edo publisher. In each one, the picture gives a short poem its setting.
The Japanese title is Bara ni kotori. It pairs the rose with kotori, which simply means a small bird.
The petals of each rose overlap in layers of pink, paler toward the center. Small dark leaves grow in clusters along the twigs. Below the lowest flowers, the stem runs bare for a stretch.
My favorite detail is the thorns. Hiroshige drew each one as a short black spike along that bare stem.
Hiroshige's part ended with a brush drawing. A carver cut it into wooden blocks, one for each color. The blue of the bird, the pink of the petals and the green of the leaves were printed one after another.
At the top, blue fades down into bare paper. At the bottom, a blue-green rises the same way.
The printer made these gradations by wiping pigment off the block by hand. No two impressions of this bird come out with exactly the same fade.
At a Glance
Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Made: 1830s
Medium: Color woodblock print on paper, in the tall, narrow aitanzaku format
Where to see it: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which holds an impression in its print collection
About This Print
Who published Hiroshige's Blue Bird and Roses?
Kawaguchiya Shōzō published Blue Bird and Roses. He was active in Edo from about 1824 to 1852, and his firm also went by the names Shōeidō and Eisendō.
How tall is the Blue Bird and Roses print?
The impression of Blue Bird and Roses in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, measures 33.5 by 11.3 centimeters, about 13 by 4.5 inches.
What kind of bird is in Blue Bird and Roses?
Hiroshige's print does not name the species. A modern reprint by the Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints, in Tokyo, calls it ruri-chō. Ruri means lapis lazuli, the deep blue stone.
11. Gustav Klimt, Poppy Field (1907)
A meadow in flower covers almost the whole of a square canvas. Red poppies are scattered through the grass, among blue, violet, yellow and white flowers. Thin tree trunks rise out of the meadow on the left and the right.
Only a narrow band at the top opens onto the land beyond, with dark rounded treetops, a strip of pale green field and a gray sky. Gustav Klimt painted it in 1907. That summer, by the Attersee lake at Litzlberg, he came across a meadow covered in poppies.