Peacock

Peacock (Kujaku) is a hanging-scroll painting by Araki Kanpo of a single peacock — the bird that, more than any other, was associated with Kanpo's name throughout his career and that secured his commercial breakthrough at the third Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exposition) of 1890. Kanpo's interest in the peacock as a subject descended directly from his early mentor Okamoto Shūki (1807-1862), the Edo Nanga painter known by the affectionate epithet 'Kujaku Shūki' (Peacock Shūki) for the quality of his peacock paintings; Kanpo absorbed Shūki's compositional habits in the close drawing of plumage, the careful staging of the bird against rocks or flowering branches, and the use of the long tail-feather sweep as a structural diagonal across the composition. In a typical Kanpo peacock, the bird is shown in the moment between display and rest, with the head turned in three-quarter profile to expose the crest and beak, the body weight distributed across a single supporting leg, and the tail feathers gathered along the lower edge of the composition in a deep horizontal that anchors the otherwise atmospheric background. The peacock, although not native to Japan, had entered the East Asian decorative repertoire centuries earlier through Chinese painting and Buddhist iconography; by the Meiji period it was a standard subject for ambitious nihonga paintings, prized both as a colorist's challenge and for the symbolic associations of beauty, dignity, and imperial power that the bird had accumulated. The work survives in private and institutional collections internationally and is representative of the mature peacock compositions for which Kanpo was best known.