Fish

Fish (魚) is a color woodblock print after Komuro Suiun's original drawing, deploying the unified-subject fish composition that runs through the East Asian kachō-e tradition from the Song-dynasty silk paintings of Liu Cai onward through the Edo-period Japanese fish prints of Hiroshige (the Sakana zukushi series of the 1830s and 1840s) and the Meiji nature-study paintings of the Kyoto Shijō school. The composition shows the fish in profile or in motion against a quiet ground in the disciplined ink-line and restrained color of Suiun's mature nanga manner, the close observation of fin, scale, and gill drawing on the literati-painter's familiarity with the Chinese ink-monochrome tradition rather than on the brighter decorative idiom of contemporary nihonga kachō-e. The print belongs to the body of small-format natural-history subjects that the Tokyo publishers issued from Suiun's drawings in the Taishō and early Shōwa periods for distribution through the domestic decorative-print market.