Silkies

Silkies is a large hanging scroll in ink and color on silk by Mori Sosen (森狙仙, 1747-1821), held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2019.419.3). The Met dates the scroll to before 1807 — placing it firmly within Sosen's mature period — and the painting measures 85.7 by 129.5 cm in the image, mounted to an unusually large full height of approximately 184 cm. The subject, silkie chickens (an ornamental breed prized in Edo Japan for their fluffy white plumage), departs from Sosen's signature monkey subject and shows the broader range of his animal practice. As an Osaka painter in the Maruyama-Shijō tradition, Sosen brought the same observational method to poultry that he applied to macaques: the particular silhouette of fluffed feathers, the awkward gait of a heavy-plumaged bird, the social grouping of hens and chicks in a domestic yard. Such scrolls were appreciated by Osaka and Kyoto patrons for their accuracy and their warmth, and the Met's large-format example shows Sosen working at the scale of a major commission rather than the smaller studio scroll. The painting is now in the public domain through the museum's open-access program.