Rai-no Tori, Thunder-bird

Rai-no Tori, Thunder-bird, an undated Isoda Koryusai print in the Victoria and Albert Museum, belongs to the strand of kacho-e production that Koryusai pursued in parallel with, and eventually in preference to, his Edo bijin-ga series. Raijin, the thunder god, is normally personified in Japanese art as a wild-haired demon ringed by drums, but the raicho or raitori variant identifies him with a bird, sometimes a peacock-like creature, sometimes an owl, whose cry produces the sound of thunder. Koryusai's design isolates the bird against a relatively spare ground and lets the legibility of its plumage and posture do the iconographic work. His Kano training is unusually visible here, in the disciplined modeling of feathers and in the way the silhouette is constructed as a balanced compositional element rather than as an excuse for ornament. From around the late 1770s Koryusai began to receive painting commissions and, eventually, the hokkyo title that traditionally honored senior painters; his bird and flower prints from this period have to be read against that aspiration to be recognized as a painter rather than as a commercial print designer. The thunder-bird sits comfortably in that ambition: a learned subject drawn from religious and folkloric tradition, treated with the seriousness more often reserved for hanging scrolls. The Victoria and Albert Museum catalogues the impression among Koryusai's bird-and-flower prints, without a precise year, and uses it as an indicator of how far Koryusai's late work moved away from the fashion documentation of Hinagata Wakana no Hatsumoyo and toward subjects in which his samurai-class training and his patient draftsmanship could speak most clearly.