Two Doves

Two Doves (双鳩図) is a 1931 hanging-scroll painting by Hirafuku Hyakusui in color on silk, depicting a pair of doves rendered with the close attention to feathering, posture, and the placement of the figure in negative space that characterized his mature bird-and-flower work. The painting is held in the permanent collection of the Tokyo National Museum, which holds several of Hyakusui's late hanging scrolls and is the most authoritative public collection of his work outside the Akita region. Doves (hato) carry associations in the Japanese cultural tradition of marital fidelity and peace, and have been a standard kachō-e subject for painters working in the Maruyama-Shijō lineage from which Hyakusui descended through his father Hirafuku Suian and his Tokyo School of Fine Arts teacher Kawabata Gyokushō. Two Doves was painted in the year after Hyakusui's election to the Imperial Art Academy (1930) and two years before his death, placing it among the last major works of his career; it is widely cited as one of the most accomplished late hanging-scroll bird paintings of the early Shōwa nihonga period, demonstrating the technical refinement and quiet authority of his mature style.