Two Magpies

Two Magpies (Kasasagi) is a hanging-scroll painting by Araki Kanpo depicting a pair of magpies in the kachō-e idiom for which he was best known, executed in ink and color on silk. Magpies (kasasagi) carry a particularly rich set of literary and cultural associations in the East Asian painting tradition: in Chinese painting and poetry they are auspicious birds whose chatter announces the arrival of a welcome visitor or of good news, and in the Japanese tradition they are most famously associated with the Tanabata festival, in which the Magpie Bridge across the Milky Way enables the once-yearly meeting of the cowherd star and the weaver maiden. They are also among the showpieces of the kachō-e specialist's repertoire because of the demanding contrast between their iridescent dark blue-black plumage and the white underparts that any successful magpie painting must capture. Kanpo's pair is rendered with the close observation of bird anatomy that his training under Araki Kankai had instilled, with the atmospheric handling of background space that his Meiji oil-painting decade had taught him, and with the restrained palette and asymmetric composition that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition had codified — all in the service of a single small image that condenses the major Meiji painting vocabularies into a tightly disciplined kachō-e composition. The painting survives in private and institutional collections internationally and is representative of the bird-pair compositions for which Kanpo was particularly admired.