Peacocks

Peacocks (Kujaku) is one of Araki Kanpo's most celebrated and historically significant compositions, painted around 1890 and held in the collections of the Sannomaru Shōzōkan (Museum of the Imperial Collections) at the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The work is closely associated with the great commercial breakthrough of Kanpo's mature career: at the third Naikoku Kangyō Hakurankai (Domestic Industrial Exposition) of 1890, his peacock compositions were awarded the second-rank prize for excellent skill (myōgi nitō shō) and purchased by the imperial household, an honor that established Kanpo as the leading peacock specialist of the Meiji nihonga school and confirmed the public reputation he carried for the remaining quarter-century of his life. The composition belongs to a long East Asian tradition of peacock painting that runs from Song-dynasty Chinese academy painting through the Kanō and Maruyama-Shijō treatments of the Edo period; Kanpo's specific debt is to his early mentor Okamoto Shūki, the Edo painter known by the affectionate epithet 'Kujaku Shūki' (Peacock Shūki) for the quality of his peacock paintings. Kanpo's treatment combines the close zoological observation of the feather structure, posture, and crest of the peacock that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition had codified with the atmospheric handling of space and shadow that he had absorbed during his decade as a Meiji-period oil painter under Kawakami Tōgai, Charles Wirgman, and Kunisawa Shinkurō. The work was acquired by the Imperial Household at the time of the 1890 exposition and remains in the Sannomaru Shōzōkan today, where it stands as a representative example of the consolidation of the kachō-e tradition under the new institutional structures of the Meiji art world.