Folding Screen with Ducks (left panel)

This folding screen with ducks (kamo zu byōbu) by Araki Kanpo is one of the larger-format works in which the painter deployed his kachō-e specialty at the scale of a domestic furnishing rather than that of an intimate hanging scroll. The screen depicts ducks on a reed-fringed shore, a subject with deep roots in East Asian painting that runs from Song-dynasty Chinese academy painting through the Kanō and Maruyama-Shijō treatments of the Edo period, and that by the late nineteenth century had become a standard test for the senior nihonga painter. Ducks (kamo) in Japanese painting and poetry carry their own seasonal and literary associations: paired ducks (oshidori, the mandarin duck) are emblems of marital fidelity, while the more general kamo of reed-fringed shores belong to the winter and early spring vocabulary of cold weather, dawn flights, and the quiet of the marshes. The screen format — typically a six-panel folding screen (rokkyoku byōbu) viewed at close quarters in a domestic interior — gave Kanpo the chance to work at architectural scale and to deploy the long horizontal sweep and atmospheric handling of distance that he had absorbed during his oil-painting decade in the 1870s, while retaining the close observation of bird anatomy and feathering structure that his earlier training under Araki Kankai had instilled. The screen is one of the larger-format documents of Kanpo's mature kachō-e practice and reflects the kind of formal commission that a senior Meiji nihonga painter was expected to deliver.