Flounder

Flounder (鰈) is a color woodblock print after Komuro Suiun's original drawing, depicting the flatfish — one of the canonical subjects of the East Asian kachō-e (bird-and-flower, broadly understood to include fish and shellfish) tradition. The flounder appears in the inherited pictorial vocabulary as a subject associated with seasonal eating and with the close observational drawing of marine subjects that the late-Edo Maruyama-Shijō and nanga schools had developed in parallel: the flat, mottled fish presents the painter with a sustained problem of pattern and silhouette that the literati ink-line was well suited to resolve. Suiun's handling deploys the disciplined brushwork and restrained color that distinguished his mature nanga production, with the fish rendered in profile or three-quarter view and the dark spotting of the upper surface carefully observed against the lighter underbody. The print belongs to the body of small-format kachō-e subjects that the Tokyo publishers issued from Suiun's drawings in the inter-war decades, and represents the more popular wing of his production aimed at the domestic decorative-print market rather than the connoisseur-collector market that consumed his hanging-scroll landscapes.