Tigers by Mountain Streams (left of a pair)

Tigers by Mountain Streams (left of a pair) is the left panel of a paired hanging-scroll composition by Kishi Chikudō, painted about 1892-1895 and now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2012.1.2.1). The two scrolls together depict tigers ranging through a mountain landscape with flowing streams, in the dramatic large-scale animal composition that was the signature of the Kishi school in its mature Meiji form. The paired-scroll format (tsuiroku) had been one of the standard high-format presentations of the senior Kyoto painter's work since the Edo period, allowing for the development of a composition across a viewing space wider than a single hanging scroll and giving the painter the opportunity to construct a sustained landscape narrative across the two panels. Chikudō's tigers are rendered with the careful zoological observation he had gained from study of live animals at the Meiji menageries together with the long diagonal compositional sweep inherited from his Kishi-school teachers Renzan and Ganku, and the mountain streams introduce the moving-water vocabulary that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition had refined into one of the central elements of nineteenth-century Kyoto landscape painting. The pair was painted in the last years of Chikudō's career, at the height of his reputation as the leading Kyoto animal painter of his generation, and entered the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2012.