Mori Sosen

Mori Sosen (森狙仙, 1747-1821) was an Osaka-based animal painter of the late Edo period, the most famous member of the Mori school and one of the defining figures of Japanese monkey painting. Born in Nishinomiya in Settsu province in 1747, he spent his career in Osaka rather than the more prestigious art centers of Kyoto and Edo, and he built his reputation through close observation of living animals rather than through copying the canonical Chinese models that dominated orthodox Kano practice.

Sosen's training is conventionally placed in the broader Maruyama-Shijō orbit. The Maruyama school, founded in Kyoto by Maruyama Ōkyo in the 1770s, had revolutionized eighteenth-century Japanese painting by insisting on direct study from nature — Ōkyo carried sketchbooks to zoos, markets, and temple grounds and built finished compositions from accumulated observation rather than from textbook models. The closely related Shijō school, founded by Ōkyo's pupil Matsumura Goshun, softened Ōkyo's realism with the literati brushwork of the Nanga tradition. Sosen's mature work belongs to this naturalistic current. He is recorded as having studied initially with the Kano-trained Yoshimura Shūnan, but his decisive influence was the Maruyama-Shijō emphasis on sketching from life.

Monkeys were Sosen's signature subject from early in his career, and he became so identified with them that in about 1808, at the age of sixty-one, he changed the first character of his name to 狙 — a character meaning 'monkey' or 'macaque' — replacing the earlier homophone he had used. The change formally fused his identity with his subject. Contemporary anecdotes describe him keeping monkeys in his Osaka studio and traveling to mountain areas to observe them in their habitat, and his paintings show a degree of anatomical and behavioral accuracy — the weight distribution of a mother holding her young, the way fur ruffles around a branch grip, the particular alert expression of a Japanese macaque — that would have been impossible without long study from life. Deer were his second favorite subject, and he also painted tigers, boars, foxes, and the full range of animal subjects favored by Edo-period patrons.

With his younger brother Mori Shūhō (1738-1823), Sosen founded an Osaka animal-painting school that paralleled the Kyoto-based Maruyama lineage, transmitting his observational method to pupils including his son Mori Tetsuzan (1775-1841) and his nephew Mori Ippō (1798-1871). The Mori school survived him by several generations and became one of the principal channels by which the Maruyama-Shijō naturalist idiom reached the late Edo and early Meiji markets in western Japan. Sosen died in Osaka in 1821 at the age of seventy-four. His paintings entered Western collections in significant numbers from the late nineteenth century onward, and his works are now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the British Museum, and other major institutions.