Falcon Perched on a Tree

Isoda Koryusai's Falcon Perched on a Tree, dated 1780 and held at the Art Institute of Chicago, belongs to the later phase of his career when he shifted attention from Yoshiwara figure prints toward kacho-e, the genre of bird-and-flower pictures. The composition isolates a single bird, its talons closed on a branch, head turned with the alertness that falconry imagery had cultivated in Japanese painting since the medieval period. Koryusai's Kano-school training is unusually legible here: the modeling of the feathers in graduated dry strokes, the disciplined silhouette against an open ground, and the controlled empty space all read more like a hanging scroll than a typical Edo polychrome print. By 1780 Koryusai had largely stepped away from the single-sheet bijin-ga that had occupied him through the previous decade, including the great fashion atlas Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo, and he had begun to receive the honorary Buddhist title hokkyo, a recognition awarded to senior painters rather than to commercial print designers. Falcon prints suited that ambition. The subject carried samurai associations, was a recognized vehicle for displaying brushwork virtuosity, and could be sold to a market eager for paintings even in printed form. The Art Institute records the impression as a nishiki-e of 1780, dating the print to this transitional moment when Koryusai was self-consciously repositioning himself as a painter who happened to design for the print market. Within his oeuvre the falcon studies stand as evidence that Koryusai's command of bijin-ga during the previous decade had never been mere genre fluency; it rested on a draftsman's training that could be turned, equally well, to the careful description of a predator's body.