Monkeys

Monkeys is a hanging-scroll painting by Mori Kansai in ink and color on silk, depicting a group of Japanese macaques (Nihon-zaru) in the kind of close-observed grouping that has been a signature of the Mori-Kishi school of Kyoto painting since the eighteenth century. The subject descends directly from Mori Sosen (1747-1821), Kansai's spiritual ancestor in the Mori line, whose monkey paintings — based on years of direct study of living and stuffed specimens — established monkeys as one of the school's defining subjects. Kansai's treatment of the fur in fine, dry-brush strokes, the careful articulation of the hands and feet, and the deployment of the group in a vertical scroll composition with ample negative space are characteristic of his Maruyama-Shijō-trained eye for animal anatomy. The Minneapolis Institute of Art's example (accession 2002.143.1) is one of several Kansai monkey paintings in major American collections and is among the works most often cited as evidence of the persistence of the Mori-Kishi monkey-painting tradition through the late nineteenth century. Signed Kansai with seal, it can be dated stylistically to the painter's mature period of the 1870s-1880s.