Water Strider

Water Strider, documented in the Japanese Art Open Database, is a small insect study in which Kono Bairei extends his Kyoto Shijo school observational discipline from birds and flowers to the minute fauna of the summer pond. The water strider (amenbo) is a long-legged hemipteran that walks on the surface tension of still water, leaving small dimples beneath its feet — a phenomenon that fascinated Japanese painters from at least the Edo period as a test case in observational drawing. Bairei renders the insect with the brushed ink line he inherited from his teachers Nakajima Raisho and Shiokawa Bunrin in the Maruyama-Shijo lineage, the thread-like legs splayed across the water surface and the body held low and forward, with the slight dimpling of the meniscus suggested by brushed wash rather than carved line. The choice of subject reflects the Shijo school's long-standing interest in extending kachō-ga beyond the canonical bird-and-flower pairings to the full range of seasonal life — insects, fish, shellfish, small mammals — that Maruyama Okyo and Matsumura Goshun had treated as legitimate painting subjects from the late eighteenth century. The composition uses high horizon and minimal background, the insect occupying only a small portion of the sheet against open ground, in the manner of a hanging scroll quoted on paper. The Japanese Art Open Database preserves the sheet (http://www.jaodb.com/db/ItemDetail.asp?item=42776) among its records of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese prints, where Water Strider stands as evidence of Bairei's range within the Meiji nihonga insect-and-plant idiom. It is a clear example of Kono Bairei applying Kyoto Shijo school observational rigor to a subject scarcely larger than a thumbnail.