Tigers by Mountain Streams (right of a pair)

Tigers by Mountain Streams (right of a pair) is the right 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 2012.1.2.2). It forms the companion to the left scroll (2012.1.2.1) and completes a composition in which tigers move through a mountain landscape with flowing streams in the dramatic Kishi-school animal manner. Read as a pair, the two scrolls show the painter constructing a sustained landscape narrative across the widened viewing field that the paired-scroll format made possible: the tigers in each panel respond to the topography of the other, the streams carry the eye from one composition into the next, and the rocky ledges and atmospheric mist set the figures into a coherent pictorial environment. Chikudō's compositional habit here — the use of long diagonal sweeps of the tigers' bodies and tails to draw the viewer through the picture, the careful observation of fur and musculature, the placement of the figures against the rushing water — represents the mature Kishi-school manner at its highest pitch and is among the most fully realized examples of the painter's late work in Western collections. The right scroll's role in the pair is to balance and complete the dynamic motion of the left, producing the kind of two-panel resolved composition for which Chikudō was particularly admired.