Crane

Crane (Tsuru, c. 1928) belongs to the substantial group of bird-and-flower compositions that Kokei produced through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, after his return from European study. The hanging scroll places a single tanchō crane — its white body, black secondary feathers, and red crown rendered in the most economical of colour areas — against a pale silk ground that is otherwise almost entirely empty. The bird's long neck and the careful weight distribution between its legs are stated in single unhesitating lines. The crane, in the Japanese pictorial tradition, is the most freighted of auspicious creatures — emblem of longevity, of married fidelity, and of imperial dignity — and Kokei's treatment of the subject is in the long lineage of Edo-period kachō painting via Maruyama Ōkyo and Watanabe Seitei; but the chilly emptiness of the ground, the absence of the conventional pine or wave companion motifs, and the slight reserve of the colour place the picture firmly in mid-century nihonga's reformed manner.