Tiger by a Stream

Tiger by a Stream is a hanging-scroll painting by Kawabata Gyokushō, executed in ink and color on silk and held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2012.1.21). The tiger has a long iconographic history in Japanese painting that runs from medieval Buddhist tiger and bamboo subjects through the great Maruyama Ōkyo painting of a sleeping tiger and a pine and into the standard nihonga repertoire of the Meiji period. Tigers were not native to Japan, and Japanese painters traditionally worked from Chinese painting models, imported tiger pelts, and (by the later nineteenth century) sketches from living animals brought through Yokohama and Kobe and exhibited in the new public zoological collections of Tokyo and Kyoto. Gyokushō was already an experienced tiger painter at a young age — a Bunkyū 3 (1863) tiger sketch by him is preserved at the Kawabata Painting School — and his mature treatments of the subject are notable for the integration of the figure with its landscape setting, the careful drawing of the striped pelt over the underlying muscular structure, and a quiet dignity in the animal's pose. Within the broader Maruyama-school painting practice that Gyokushō inherited from Nakajima Raishō, the tiger functioned as one of the key tests of a senior painter's skill, and the Minneapolis composition is a strong representative of that tradition as it was carried into Meiji nihonga.