Katsushika Hokusai – Bullfinch and Weeping Cherry, c. 1834 | Giclée Print

A bullfinch hangs upside down from a branch of weeping cherry, and the whole sheet is the colour of a night sky. This is one of the small bird-and-flower prints Hokusai made around 1834, in the same years and for the same publisher as Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

The blue is the point. It is Prussian blue — bero-ai, a synthetic pigment imported through Nagasaki and, by the early 1830s, cheap enough to lay across a whole sheet. Japanese printers had never had a blue that held its depth without fading. It is the same pigment that carries Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and here Hokusai spends it on the ground rather than the subject: the bird and the blossom are almost uncoloured, and the sky does the work.

The birds in this group are not decorative. Each is a species a Japanese reader would name at a glance — here uso, the bullfinch — paired with the plant that flowers at the same moment.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Art Institute of Chicago's own open-access photograph of the sheet. It is not a nineteenth-century impression and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 25.4 × 19.1 cm / 10 × 7.5 in — colour woodblock print, chūban, Art Institute of Chicago
27 × 35 cm / 10.6 × 13.8 in — original size, 1:1. Image 18.87 × 25.40 cm.
40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — enlarged, 1.72× original. Image 32.39 × 43.60 cm.

Why the small sheet is 27 × 35 and not 30 × 40. A chūban is a small sheet — about the size of a sheet of A4 turned upright. At 1:1 it needs a sheet that sits close around it, or the picture floats. 27 × 35 leaves a border of four centimetres at the sides and fits the standard 11 × 14 inch frame.

Why the large sheet stops at 1.72×. House ceiling for line work is 1.8×. Enlarge a woodblock print further and you enlarge the cut line itself — the carver's stroke starts to look like a drawn one. The 40 × 50 sheet takes the picture as far as that rule allows.

A note on the trim. The sheet was cut close to the printed block, and the museum's scan carries a few millimetres of scanner ground around it. That ground is removed; the printed block is reproduced whole, edge to edge, including the signature and publisher's seal at the upper right.

Provenance
Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (Japanese, 1760–1849), Bullfinch and Weeping Cherry (Uso, shidarezakura), from an untitled series of flowers and birds, c. 1834.
Colour woodblock print, chūban; 25.4 × 19.1 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, Acc. No. 1925.3367.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under CC0.

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