Bird on a Branch

Bird on a Branch is a hanging-scroll painting by Matsumura Keibun in the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 24453.1924, formerly identified as 24453), dated to the early-to-mid nineteenth century and entered into the museum's collection as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold G. Henderson. The work depicts a single small bird perched on the branch of a flowering tree, rendered in the spare Shijō school manner of closely observed motif against generous negative space that Keibun made his characteristic mode across a thirty-year career as head of the Kyoto Shijō school. The bird is drawn with the attention to feathering structure and to the angle of foot-on-branch that the school's shasei (sketching from life) practice demanded, while the branch is placed in a long diagonal across the upper part of the silk, with most of the picture surface left as breathing room around the figure. The painting represents Keibun in his standard mature register — the small kachō-e subjects on which his reputation rested in his own lifetime and on which his teaching of pupils such as Yokoyama Seiki and Shiokawa Bunrin was built. The mounting measures nearly two meters in length, framing the painting within the formal architecture of the classical hanging scroll, and the work as a whole exemplifies the kind of Shijō kachō-e that entered American collections through the Japonisme moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.