Sparrow and Spider

Sparrow and Spider is a hanging-scroll painting by Matsumura Keibun, held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2015.79.168), depicting a single sparrow encountering a spider on a single branching plant — a small kachō-e subject characteristic of the painter's mature Shijō school practice. The sparrow (suzume) is the canonical small bird of Japanese kachō-e, drawn from immediate observation rather than from classical Chinese painting models, and the spider supplies a counterweight from the long tradition of insect studies that had entered Japanese painting through the Maruyama school of Maruyama Ōkyo. Keibun's composition uses the spare, asymmetric placement of motif against negative space that he made his characteristic compositional habit, and the brushwork shows the close attention to the structure of bird plumage and to the angle of foot-on-branch that the Shijō school's shasei (sketching from life) discipline required. The picture is an example of the kind of small bird-and-flower subject that Keibun produced in quantity across his career and that supplied the most reliable demand for his work both in his own lifetime, among Kyoto patrons, and afterward, among Western collectors who acquired Japanese painting through the Japonisme moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.