Hokusai's bird-and-flower prints belong to a genre, kacho-e, with a long ancestry in Chinese painting, where the pairing of birds and flowering plants had been an established subject since at least the Tang and Song dynasties^[1]. Japanese critics have consistently traced the composition, firm line work and bright colouring of prints like Hokusai's back to this Chinese tradition, a lineage the artist himself would have understood as part of a shared East Asian painting practice rather than a purely Japanese invention^[1].

A small chuban-format print from around 1832, published by Nishimura Eijudo as part of a set of ten, shows a kingfisher twisting in flight among iris and pinks. Its composition, built around a single strong corner of interest and enlivened by the sharply drawn, tough-looking bird darting between the leaves of the iris, is characteristic of Hokusai's handling of the genre during this period^[1]. The firmly depicted lines and brilliant colouration give the print a decorative immediacy that later critics have linked directly to its Chinese painting sources.

Hokusai produced his most admired bird-and-flower compositions in the early 1830s, the same years he designed the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series he began at around seventy years old and later expanded with ten further prints while keeping the original title^[2]. Across a working life that spanned more than seventy years, from his first signed work as a teenager in 1778 to his death in 1849, Hokusai changed his professional name more than thirty times, moving from Shunro to Sori and eventually to Hokusai and Taito at different points, a naming pattern that historians still use to help date individual prints^[3][4]. He produced several thousand prints, paintings, sketches and book illustrations across his career, illustrating well over a hundred literary works, and continued working with undiminished energy well into old age.