Sitting Tiger

Sitting Tiger is a hanging scroll painting by Kishi Chikudō in ink and color on paper, in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, depicting a seated tiger rendered in the Kishi school's signature animal-painting manner. The composition isolates the tiger against an open ground in the format that the Kishi house had inherited from its founder Kishi Ganku, whose own seated and reclining tigers had established the iconic forms of the school's animal repertoire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chikudō's handling combines the careful descriptive observation of fur, claws, and facial expression that his earliest training under the Maruyama-Shijō painter Nakajima Raishō had instilled with the bolder ink handling and dramatic posture inherited from his Kishi-school teachers Renzan and Ganku. The tiger had occupied a complex position in Japanese painting before live specimens became available at the Meiji menageries: earlier painters had worked from imported Chinese models, from tiger pelts brought back from the Asian mainland, and from cats observed in the studio as anatomical analogues, producing the somewhat stylized tigers of the Edo period; Chikudō's generation was among the first able to study live animals, and the result was a body of tiger paintings that brought new descriptive precision to the traditional Kishi compositional formulas. The Minneapolis painting is representative of the kind of single-tiger composition for which Chikudō was particularly admired and survives as one of the principal Western collection examples of his work.