Utagawa Hiroshige – Sparrows and Camellia in Snow, c. 1831–33 | Giclée Print

Snow falls through a blue sky in flat white flecks, printed one by one from the block. A camellia branch carries its blossoms and a load of snow across the top of the sheet; below, where the blue fades into the bare paper, two sparrows come in with their wings open.

The format is ōtanzaku — a tall, narrow panel of about 38 by 17 centimetres, the shape used for poem-slips and for pictures hung 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 printing is at its most inventive: the graded blue, the white of the snow left as bare paper, the birds drawn in five or six strokes.

Which impression. Woodblocks wear and pigments fade, so no two surviving sheets look alike. This one is the Art Institute of Chicago's, the gift of H. R. Warner — the blue is still even from top to bottom, and the red of the camellia has not gone brown.

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 × 17.3 cm / 15.0 × 6.8 in — ōtanzaku, Art Institute of Chicago
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 16.88 × 37.09 cm.
50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — enlarged, 1.7× original. Image 28.22 × 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 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), Sparrows and Camellia in Snow, c. 1831–33; colour woodblock print, ōtanzaku, 38 × 17.3 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of H. R. Warner, Acc. No. 1932.208.
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.