Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

Utagawa Hiroshige – Peacock and Peonies, 1830s | Giclée Print

40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — Original size, 1:1
CHF 59.00
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Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Peacock and Peonies, 1830s — the tall ōtanzaku sheet reproduced whole, a peacock among pink and white peonies on a teal ground
  • Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at the size printed on the 50 × 70 sheet: the peacock's head among the peonies, the printed grain of the 1830s impression
  • Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies as a 40 × 50 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Utagawa Hiroshige, Peacock and Peonies, 1830s — the tall ōtanzaku sheet reproduced whole, a peacock among pink and white peonies on a teal ground
  • Hiroshige's Peacock and Peonies as a 50 × 70 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at the size printed on the 50 × 70 sheet: the peacock's head among the peonies, the printed grain of the 1830s impression
Utagawa Hiroshige – Peacock and Peonies, 1830s | Giclée Print

Utagawa Hiroshige – Peacock and Peonies, 1830s | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

A peacock stands in a bank of peonies, its tail running up the right edge of the sheet and out of the picture. The format is ōtanzaku — a tall, narrow panel of about 38 by 17.5 centimetres, the shape used for poem-slips and for pictures meant to hang in the narrow space between two posts.

Hiroshige is remembered for landscapes, but he made hundreds of bird-and-flower panels like this one, and they are the sheets in which his colour is boldest: a flat teal ground, the pink of the peonies laid on in two strengths, the eyes of the tail feathers printed in a blue that still reads as metal. The poem in the upper left belongs to the design, not to the catalogue.

Which impression. Woodblocks wear and pigments fade, so no two surviving sheets look alike. This one is the Art Institute of Chicago's, from the Clarence Buckingham Collection — the teal ground is even and unfaded and the peacock blue in the tail is intact.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a woodblock print and is not sold as one — a woodblock print is pulled by hand from cut cherry blocks, and the good impressions are in museums.

Scale
Original: 38 × 17.5 cm / 15.0 × 6.9 in — ōtanzaku, Art Institute of Chicago
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 17.12 × 37.22 cm.
50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — enlarged, 1.7× original. Image 28.52 × 62.00 cm.

A narrow picture on a standard sheet. A panel of this shape has no standard frame of its own. The sheet sizes that would fit it tightly — 25 × 60 cm and the like — mean a made-to-measure frame and made-to-measure glass. So the picture is centred on our normal sheets instead, with the side borders wider than the top and bottom. That is how a narrow picture is matted anyway, and it means you can frame this one in a 16 × 20 or 20 × 28 inch frame bought off the shelf.

The sheet is reproduced whole, including the poem and the signature. Nothing is cropped away but the museum's mount.

Provenance
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), Peacock and Peonies, 1830s; colour woodblock print, ōtanzaku, 38 × 17.5 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, Acc. No. 1943.633.
Public domain. The museum publishes its digitisation under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The paper tone of the original is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

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