Cranes and Bamboo

Cranes and Bamboo, designed by Isoda Koryusai in 1769, presents a kacho-ga (bird-and-flower) composition pairing one of the most prized auspicious motifs of East Asian art — the long-legged Japanese crane — with the resilient evergreen of bamboo. Together these motifs invoke the wishes for long life, integrity and rectitude that suffused new-year imagery and gift culture in Edo. Koryusai had absorbed the kacho-ga conventions of Kano and Tosa painting through his early training as a samurai-amateur before his shift to ukiyo-e, and his bird studies of the late 1760s and 1770s would establish him alongside Kitao Shigemasa as one of the strongest designers of polychrome bird prints in the generation immediately following Suzuki Harunobu. The Art Institute of Chicago impression (object 21207) shows the cranes with crisp keyblock contours, their black wing primaries and red crowns set against the pale grey-green of the bamboo and a soft bokashi sky; the slender bamboo stalks rise vertically through the composition, anchoring the birds within an elegantly attenuated space. The print exemplifies Koryusai's mastery of the chuban or pillar-print formats favoured for kacho-ga and reveals the bird-and-flower vocabulary that would underwrite his many later commissions for hanging-scroll-derived designs. Even within his prolific output of Edo bijin-ga and the courtesan portraits of Hinagata Wakana, Koryusai consistently returned to bird-and-flower subjects as a parallel current; this Cranes and Bamboo confirms his fluency in the auspicious idiom and his careful preservation of the painted tradition's symbolic vocabulary on the printed sheet. Source: Art Institute of Chicago, https://www.artic.edu/artworks/21207.