Kōno Bairei Prints
1844–1895 · Japanese · Maruyama-Shijō school / kachō-e (bird-and-flower painting)
Kōno Bairei's bird-and-flower woodblocks from 1880s Kyoto — cranes and peonies, egrets among iris, a kingfisher diving at water lilies, sparrows by violets. Soft, painterly kachō-e, restored and printed to order.
19 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Kōno Bairei
Kōno Bairei was born Yasuda Bairei in Kyoto on 3 March 1844 and spent his working life there, as a painter, book illustrator and teacher. From 1852 he studied with Nakajima Raishō, a painter of the Maruyama school, and after Raishō's death in 1871 with the Shijō master Shiokawa Bunrin, so that he came out of the broad Maruyama-Shijō tradition of close observation from nature. His speciality was kachō-e, bird-and-flower pictures, which he gave a light touch of Western realism. In 1880 he opened an art school in Kyoto, and he trained a generation of the city's leading painters, among them Takeuchi Seihō, Kawai Gyokudō and Uemura Shōen. He reached his widest audience through woodblock-printed picture books: Bairei's Album of One Hundred Birds, published in Kyoto by Okura Magobei in 1881, set each bird in its season among flowers, reeds or water, printed in soft, carefully graded colour, and the woodblock birds restored here come from that same printed bird-and-flower work of the early 1880s. He died on 20 February 1895. Ohara Koson, a generation younger, worked the same subjects for Western buyers; Bairei's birds are looser and more painterly, made first for Japanese readers.