Chinese Lions and Peonies

"Chinese Lions and Peonies" by Isoda Koryusai, dated about 1767, takes one of the most heavily symbolic motifs of the East Asian decorative tradition, the karashishi or Chinese lion paired with the tree peony, and translates it into the early nishiki-e idiom of Edo ukiyo-e. The pairing of lion and peony, drawn from continental Chinese precedent and long established in Japanese painting through the Kano school, signals strength, longevity and the king of beasts framed by the king of flowers. Koryusai handles the subject at chuban scale, the two lions arranged among heavy peony blooms whose dense red and pink masses give the design its principal colour accent. Working as the principal Harunobu successor in the early years of full-color nishiki-e printing, he is using the new multi-block technique here in a deliberately decorative mode, almost as if translating a painted byobu screen into a commercial print. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the careful registration and the relatively bold palette, salmon, deep red, olive, dark grey, that the subject demands. Within Koryusai's larger output the print is a useful early example of the natural-history and decorative strand that would later occupy a significant portion of his hashira-e (pillar print) production, and an indication of how rapidly Edo ukiyo-e designers were applying the new full-color technique to subjects well beyond the dominant categories of bijin-ga and yakusha-e.