Tigress with Cubs

Tigress with Cubs is a hanging scroll painting by Kishi Chikudō of a tigress crouched with her two cubs, executed in color and light ink on silk around 1895 and now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum (accession number 1991.76). The work is one of the most fully realized of Chikudō's tiger compositions of his late career and belongs to the body of tiger paintings for which the painter was most famous in his own lifetime and remains best known today. Tigers in the Kishi school's animal-painting vocabulary derived from the powerful, large-scale tigers of the school's founder Kishi Ganku (1749-1838), whose Korean-trained understanding of the tiger as a subject had given the Kishi house its distinctive identity; by the time Chikudō was painting in the 1890s the tiger had become the signature subject of the lineage, demanding both descriptive accuracy of fur, posture, and expression and the dramatic compositional sweep that distinguished a senior Kishi-school tiger from a generic Maruyama-Shijō animal study. Chikudō's tigress is rendered with the close zoological observation he had absorbed at the Meiji menageries — among the first opportunities Japanese painters had to study live tigers — together with the careful attention to maternal expression and protective posture that turns the painting into both a feat of natural observation and a study of family feeling. The cubs at the tigress's feet introduce a note of intimate domesticity into the otherwise commanding image of the adult animal, and the work as a whole is representative of the late-career tiger compositions for which Chikudō was best known.