Feeding the Rooster

Feeding the Rooster is a Keisai Eisen surimono catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago and dated to 1801. The print belongs to the strand of Edo ukiyo-e that uses domestic animals as both subject and emblem — a rooster invokes vigilance, the dawn, and the calendrical sign that gave certain years their lucky character. Eisen pictures a young woman crouched in a sun-dappled corner, holding out a hand of grain to a fine cockerel whose tail rises in a sweeping arc that the artist plainly relishes drawing. The bird's plumage is built from dense bands of pattern that range across the surimono's most sumptuous techniques: black inks layered over rust and ochre, with selective use of metallic pigments and embossing to render the iridescent breast and tail feathers. The woman, by contrast, is described with sparer means — a quiet kimono of pale color and a soft, downward-tilted face that connects her to Eisen's mature bijin-ga vocabulary. The composition's pleasure lies in the contrast between the bird's exuberance and the woman's restraint, a balance that Edo ukiyo-e surimono designers were particularly good at orchestrating. Kyoka verses distributed around the figures would have anchored the scene in the language games of a particular poetry circle, while the print's restrained color and embossed surfaces would have signaled its status as a private gift rather than a commercial sheet. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the impression survives as a piece of evidence for how Eisen handled animal subjects within the emblematic format of the surimono, complementing his more familiar work as a designer of fashionable women.