Cock Eyeing a Free-standing Screen Painted with Cock, Hen, and Chicks, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jo), vol. 1. Artist: Yanagawa Shigenobu (Japanese, 1787-1832). Culture: Japan. Dimensions: 7 11/16 x 10 7/8 in. (19.5 x 27.6 cm). Date: probably 1813.Surimono are privately published woodblock prints, usually commissioned by poets or poetry groups as a form of New Year's greeting card. The poems, most commonly kyoka (witty thirty-one syllable verse), inscribed on the prints usually include felicitous imagery connected with spring, which in the lunar calendar begins on the first day of the first month. Themes of surimono are often erudite, frequently alluding to Japanese literary classics in both texts and images.This album belongs to a set of three compiled by Hayashi Tadamasa, the great Parisian dealer of Japanese art. Hayashi arranged the more than four hundred prints in the set on facing leaves according to themes, or in a way that created an attractive arrangeme