Eagles

Eagles is an ink-on-paper composition by Kanō Hōgai dated 1885 and held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (one of the major holdings of late Hōgai work outside Japan, much of it acquired by Ernest Fenollosa and Charles Goddard Weld and bequeathed to the museum as the Fenollosa-Weld Collection). The painting measures roughly 93.2 by 165.7 centimetres and depicts a pair of large raptors set against an ink-washed ground of cliffs and clouded sky. Raptors had been a central Kanō subject from the seventeenth century — Kanō Tan'yū and his successors used them as emblems of vigilance and shogunal authority on the painted screens of major Edo residences — and Hōgai's treatment unites that long Kanō genealogy with the close anatomical observation he had absorbed from Western painting through Ernest Fenollosa in the early 1880s. The eagles' plumage is built up in layered ink strokes that record the precise structure of feathers without abandoning the Kanō convention of expressive linear contour, while the surrounding landscape uses the soft atmospheric wash characteristic of Hōgai's late period. The painting is one of the canonical Hōgai works in any American collection and is reproduced widely in standard surveys of early Meiji painting.