Black Cat (Kuroki Neko)

Painted in 1910 during the final year of the artist's life, Black Cat (Kuroki Neko) is one of the most celebrated images in modern Japanese painting and an officially designated Important Cultural Property of Japan. The hanging scroll, executed in color on silk, depicts a single black cat perched on the bough of an oak tree, its body turned in three-quarter profile and its bright yellow eyes fixed on the viewer with an arresting directness. Behind the cat the silk ground is rendered in a luminous gold leaf field that flattens the picture plane and isolates the animal as a sharply defined silhouette against a glowing atmospheric background. The work synthesizes the two formal projects of Hishida's late career: the mōrō-tai ('hazy style') tradition of suppressed contour and atmospheric color that he and Yokoyama Taikan had pioneered through the previous decade, and a renewed engagement with the precise naturalistic observation of his early training under Hashimoto Gahō. The cat's anatomy is described with detailed fine-line drawing — the texture of the fur, the curve of the tail, the alert posture — while the surrounding tree branches, leaves, and gold-leaf ground are handled with the broader washes and atmospheric tonal gradations of the mōrō-tai vocabulary. Painted while Hishida was in declining health from the kidney disease that would kill him later that year, Black Cat was completed in remarkably swift order: he is said to have settled on the composition only after his original concept of a white cat against a colored background was abandoned. The work was shown at the fourth Bunten exhibition in October 1910 and immediately recognized as a masterpiece of late-Meiji painting. It is now held by the Eisei Bunko Foundation and displayed at the Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art.