Cuttle Fish

Cuttle Fish is an early-nineteenth-century surimono by Kikuchi Yōsai (菊池容斎, 1788-1878), held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP2132) and printed in ink and color on paper at approximately 14.1 by 18.9 centimeters. Like its companion in the Met collection, Cherry Flowers, the sheet is an example of the privately commissioned, deluxe woodblock format that circulated among kyōka poetry circles and literary clubs in late Edo. The subject — a cuttlefish (ika), rendered with the close naturalistic attention to body and tentacle characteristic of the Maruyama-Shijō observational tradition Yōsai had absorbed alongside his Kanō training — places the print within a broader Edo and Osaka taste for sea-creature surimono, in which painters and printmakers combined direct observation, calligraphic brushwork, and accompanying verse. The Met source confirms the attribution to Yōsai and the early-nineteenth-century dating, anchoring the sheet to the period before Yōsai's full commitment to the Zenken kojitsu project and to the broader literary culture in which his career was rooted. As a small, signed print, Cuttle Fish documents one of the formats through which a painter principally known for historical-figure portraits also participated in the sociable, literary print culture of his time.