Sazanka flower blooms brightly under the cold weather from autumn through winter. It has been featured in children’s songs in Japan to be very familiar and loved by many Japanese people.

In this work, Nishio Shiho, a Japanese-style painter, elegantly depicts such a flower in a few colors along with sumi ink. The depiction of 3 different states of the flower in a single painting (the bud, the beginning of blooming, and the flowering state) express the time axis of sazanka. The phoenicurus auroreus perched on the branch seems to be pleased with sazanka’s blossoming, which makes the audience smile. The haiku poetry next to the sazanka is by Masaoka Shiki, one of the most famous haiku poets of the Mēji era. Its meaning is as follows:

I decided to make this place, where sazanka flowers bloom, my study.

Masaoka Shiki may have read this haiku because he liked the place where he could see the sazanka flowers blooming. Nishio Shiho may then have felt the same way when she saw the beautiful blooming sazanka to thus add this haiku to this work.