Two Quail

Two Quail, dated 1892 and held by the Rijksmuseum (via Wikimedia Commons), is a single-opening composition from one of Imao Keinen's Kyoto-published kachō-ga albums in which the artist applies his Maruyama-Shijō observational discipline to one of the canonical autumn birds of Japanese painting. The quail (uzura) — small, ground-dwelling, mottled-brown game bird of the Japanese countryside — had been a recurring autumn subject in Japanese painting since at least the Kamakura period, when the canonical scroll of Tosa Mitsuoki's quail-and-millet composition fixed the species as the canonical bird of the harvest field. By the Edo period, quail painting had become a specialist subject within Japanese natural-history painting, with the species cultivated for its observed character of furtive ground-foraging and small-flock organization. As a leading pupil of Kōno Bairei and an heir to the Maruyama-Shijō observational discipline of Maruyama Ōkyo and Matsumura Goshun, Keinen rendered the birds with the brushed ink line characteristic of his Kyoto nihonga training, the brown-mottled plumage given through soft graded color and the postural relation between the two birds — typically one foraging head-down and the other watching alert — observed from life. The composition uses high horizon and minimal background, the quail placed against unprinted ground or a brushed indication of grass and harvest stubble in the manner of a hanging scroll quoted on paper. The Rijksmuseum holds the sheet within its substantial Japanese print collection (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection), where prints of this kind document Keinen's command of the canonical autumn kachō-ga repertoire outside his more famous illustrated albums. It is a clear example of Imao Keinen applying the Maruyama-Shijō observational discipline to one of the most charged autumn bird subjects of the Japanese painting calendar.