Eagle Flying in Snow - Ohara Koson Art Print

Snow falls sideways across this 1933 sheet, and one raptor leans into it. Ohara Koson, born in Kanazawa and trained by Suzuki Kason, drew the plunge for Watanabe's print shop in Tokyo. That shop burned in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. Ten winters later it was shipping shin-hanga bird prints across the Pacific.

Eagle Flying in Snow hangs on a single tilt. Umber wings rise in a steep V over a russet crown, and an ochre bill hovers above the trees, a fishhook on an invisible line. Hiroshige sent an eagle over snowbound Fukagawa in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Koson answers that ukiyo-e ancestor with a harder wind.

Read the feathers closely. Sepia-black primaries splay at the upper left, each quill cut as its own blade by a master block carver. Chestnut neck feathers bristle above one unblinking eye. Chalk bars flash along the wing's edge where the bird banks.

Slate-gray streaks rake the paper. Frosted pines crouch in Prussian-blue shadow opposite the Shōson signature and its cinnabar seal. In January 1936 this early Shōwa woodblock hung in the Toledo Museum of Art's show of modern Japanese prints. Give this vintage Japanese art print a hallway. The eagle has been falling for over ninety years and still has not touched the trees.