Bamboo and Tiger

This hand-colored hosoban urushi-e in the Art Institute of Chicago depicts a tiger crouched among bamboo, one of the canonical kacho-e (bird-and-flower, broadly construed) subjects of East Asian painting. The tiger-and-bamboo pairing carries Confucian and Daoist symbolism (the tiger as embodiment of yang energy and martial strength, bamboo as the flexible scholar-gentleman who bends but does not break) and was a standard motif in Chinese ink painting that ukiyo-e designers adapted to the print medium. Shigenaga, whose tigers were never observed from life (no tigers lived in Japan and most Japanese artists worked from earlier Chinese and Korean models or from imported pelts), nevertheless produces a creature of considerable visual presence, its stripes carefully alternated and its pose lifted from the classical painting repertoire. The urushi-e treatment applies lacquered ink to the stripes and to the dark passages of the bamboo, giving the print a tactile gloss that the keyblock alone could not achieve. The hosoban scale (about 33 by 15 cm) was unusual for tiger subjects, which more often appeared on larger formats, and Shigenaga's compression of the motif into the narrow vertical demonstrates his compositional ingenuity.