from the series One Hundred Pictures by Kyôsai (Kyôsai hyakuzu)

Tigers appear in Kyōsai hyakuzu as a demonstration of the artist's command of the Chinese-derived painting tradition that treated the tiger as a symbol of ferocious vitality. Kyōsai never traveled to China, and Japanese artists had never seen live tigers, yet the subject had been codified through generations of Kanō-school painting from imported Chinese models. This print likely shows a tiger among bamboo or waves — the two most conventional settings — with the striped coat rendered in the ochre-and-black color vocabulary inherited from that tradition. What distinguishes Kyōsai's tigers from earlier Kanō examples is a restless, coiled energy: the animal is rarely static, and its pose implies imminent movement. The woodblock carvers faced the challenge of replicating the texture of the fur — short parallel marks over the body, longer sweeping strokes along the flanks — with the grain of the cherry-wood block. Bokashi shading beneath the haunches grounds the form.