Pheasant Among Snow-Laden Bamboo on Hillside — Utagawa Hiroshige

Snow has settled on every bamboo stalk. A pheasant — his plumage a precise inventory of burnt gold, deep green, and rust red — clings to a bending branch, still against the cold silence of the hillside. In the distance, more bamboo bends under the same white weight. The sky is the pale, washed-out colour that only winter gives.

This is Hiroshige at his most concentrated: a kachō-e — a bird-and-flower print — where the entire world is reduced to a single moment of seasonal stillness. No travellers, no stations, no famous views. Just an animal and the weather, rendered with the kind of attention that makes you slow down.

About the print

Alongside his celebrated landscape series, Utagawa Hiroshige produced some of the finest kachō-e in the ukiyo-e tradition — floral and bird prints that distilled the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness of passing beauty, into a single composition. Snow-laden bamboo was one of the quintessential subjects of this genre: structurally bold, seasonally precise, and quietly melancholic. The pheasant — a bird associated in Japanese visual culture with winter mountain landscapes — completes the scene with a weight of colour that makes the surrounding white feel colder.

Where Hiroshige's landscape series, from the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō to the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, show his genius for atmosphere at scale, the kachō-e show the same eye working in miniature: every detail exact, every colour chosen not for decoration but for feeling.

→ Discover all Hiroshige's series and his influence on Western art on our Utagawa Hiroshige artist page.

The reproduction

Printed on heavyweight archival matte paper using pigment-based inks with a colour gamut wide enough to render the deep indigo shadows and the warm, layered golds of the pheasant's plumage. The bokashi gradients — the characteristic soft wash that gives ukiyo-e its atmospheric depth — are faithfully preserved. Delivered flat or rolled in a rigid protective tube, ready to frame.

• Museum-quality archival paper
• Pigment-based inks, fade-resistant for decades
• Available in multiple sizes
• Ships worldwide