Cat Catching an Insect

Cat Catching an Insect by Isoda Koryusai is a small, vivid study of feline focus. A cat crouches in mid-pounce, its body coiled and tail flicking, as it tracks an insect that hovers just out of immediate reach. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves the impression that documents this design, dating it to around 1772, in the period when Koryusai was extending the kacho-e tradition into less conventional subjects. The cat occupied an ambivalent place in Edo iconography, at once a domestic familiar and a symbol of feminine wile, and ukiyo-e designers returned to the animal repeatedly as a kind of pictorial alter ego for the courtesan. Koryusai's print here keeps the animal as the sole subject of attention, but the precision with which he records the gesture of attack rewards the same close looking that his viewers brought to the Edo bijin-ga of his celebrated series Hinagata Wakana Hatsu Moyo. The composition is organized around the tension between predator and prey, with the cat's gaze providing the spine of the design and the suggestion of the insect supplying the vector along which the eye is forced to travel. For collectors of kacho-e and of Koryusai more generally, the print is an unusually intimate example of the artist's observational range.