This small set of prints by Japanese artists dates from 1880. The date of the original drawings is uncertain, but likely to be sometime in the early 1800s or late 1700s.
Japanese artists were celebrated for their lifelike and exquisite rendering of natural subjects. They would often specialise in a particular area of nature - aquatic birds, fish insects, or flowers - devoting themselves to the pursuit of the 'accurate delineation of the object... intuitive feeling for beauty of line and harmony of colour'.
These drawings were intended as preparatory sketches for further works, and the artists are unidentified. The studies include different aspects of the head or wing on the same page, and handwritten notes for the finished artwork - colours, age and sex of bird, season. Sometimes feathers are even stuck into the page for later reference.
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