Hollyhocks and Peacocks (Aoi ni kujaku)

Dated to the early 1730s and held in the Art Institute of Chicago, Hollyhocks and Peacocks (Aoi ni kujaku) is a hand-coloured hosoban urushi-e by Nishimura Shigenobu that documents his engagement with the kacho-e (bird-and-flower picture) tradition, the classical Chinese-derived genre of bird-and-flower painting that had been adapted into Japanese woodblock printing during the early-Edo period. The pairing of hollyhocks (aoi), the summer-flowering plant strongly associated with the Tokugawa shogunal crest, and peacocks (kujaku), the auspicious oriental bird of paradise, draws on the iconographic conventions of Kano-school decorative painting and the Chinese kacho-e tradition that the Kano academy had domesticated for Japanese audiences over the preceding three centuries. Shigenobu's hosoban composition, with the narrow vertical sheet accommodating the soaring hollyhock stems and the elaborately fanned tail of the peacock, demonstrates the format's flexibility for bird-and-flower subjects as well as for figural ones. The urushi-e finish, with its glossy black areas providing dramatic contrast to the hand-applied beni pink and the green and yellow mineral pigments of the foliage and bird plumage, represents the early-1730s refinement of the hand-colouring vocabulary. The work demonstrates Shigenobu's range beyond actor portraits and bijinga into the kacho-e tradition, and it documents the migration of Kano-school decorative subjects into the woodblock medium in the years before the full polychrome revolution of the mid-eighteenth century would expand the chromatic possibilities of the genre.