Cat and Plum Blossoms

Painted around 1906, the year following Hishida Shunsō's return to Japan from his two-year tour of India, the United States, and Europe with Yokoyama Taikan, Cat and Plum Blossoms (Ume ni Neko) is a hanging scroll in color on silk that depicts a single sleek-coated cat curled around the base of a flowering plum tree. The composition is dominated by the white and pale-pink blossoms of the plum branch arching across the upper register of the scroll, while the cat — rendered with the same kind of fine-line naturalistic draftsmanship that Hishida would later apply to his celebrated Black Cat of 1910 — sits below with its head turned alertly upward. The plum branch and its blossoms are handled in the mōrō-tai mode with washes of subtle tonal color and atmospheric suggestion, the silver-white blossoms emerging from the silk ground as luminous spots of light rather than as sharply contoured forms. The cat itself is drawn more precisely, providing a sharp focal point of detailed observation against the atmospheric background — the same compositional logic of contrast that Hishida would push further in Black Cat four years later. The plum blossom is one of the most iconic seasonal subjects in East Asian painting, associated with early spring, the resurgence of life after winter, and (through its frequent use in literati poetry) personal moral integrity in the face of adversity. Hishida's treatment integrates this traditional iconographic resonance with the formal innovations of the Nihon Bijutsuin circle. The work is now held in the Adachi Museum of Art and was documented through the Google Art Project.