Tiger in the Rain

Tiger in the Rain is a hanging scroll in ink and colors on paper by the Osaka animal painter Mori Sosen (森狙仙, 1747-1821), held in the Art Institute of Chicago from the Frederick W. Gookin Collection. Catalogued as late eighteenth to early nineteenth century — within Sosen's mature period — the scroll measures roughly 95.5 by 33 cm in the painting itself, mounted to a full hanging height of approximately 181 cm. Tigers were a recurring subject in Edo-period Japanese painting despite the fact that no Japanese painter had ever seen a living one: the animal was understood through Chinese painting models, imported pelts, and the imaginative reconstruction those sources permitted. Sosen, working in the Maruyama-Shijō tradition founded by Maruyama Ōkyo, brought to this conventionally imagined subject the same naturalistic vocabulary he developed through direct observation of monkeys and deer — careful attention to the structure of fur, the weight of a quadruped's stance, and the particular bristling reaction of an animal to weather. Rain in Japanese painting is rendered as a graphic device, oblique lines of ink wash across the field of the composition, and the conjunction of tiger and rain belongs to a broader Edo tradition that included Maruyama Ōkyo's own famous tiger paintings. The Art Institute's scroll places Sosen within this tradition while showing the observational closeness that made him the dominant Mori-school animal painter of his generation.