Jakuchu's Rooster

The title pays homage to Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800), the Edo painter known for his eccentric, hyperrealist depictions of roosters in works such as the Dōshoku Sai-e series held in the Imperial collection. Aida's aquatint reinterprets the subject through the velvety tonal range of an intaglio plate rather than the polychrome silk Jakuchū used. The aquatint process — grounding the plate with rosin dust and biting it sequentially in acid — yields the graduated blacks and feathery grey fields that suit a rooster's overlapping plumage, while reserved highlights describe the comb, wattle and tail-coverts. The print sits in Aida's wider strand of bird-and-flower (kachō-e) imagery and reflects her habit of acknowledging earlier Japanese masters from within a London-based studio practice. Trained at Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku before her postgraduate move to the Royal College of Art, Aida frequently translates classical Edo subjects through the European intaglio idiom, treating Jakuchū here not as direct copy but as a starting point for her own tonal investigation of feather, claw and the bird's characteristic upright posture.