Cat

Cat, in the Art Institute of Chicago and undated within the artist's career, depicts a single feline figure in Shibata Zeshin's mature painting manner. The cat had been a popular subject in Edo painting and printmaking since at least the early nineteenth century, when Utagawa Kuniyoshi had built an entire pictorial subgenre around the domestic feline, and Shijo painters had extended the manner with their characteristic observational attention to animal anatomy and posture. Zeshin's training under Suzuki Nanrei and Okamoto Toyohiko had given him the Shijo vocabulary for rendering the cat with the school's emphasis on direct observation, and the brushwork registers the rounded volumes of the body and the particular alertness of the head with calligraphic economy. His earliest and equally formative training had been in lacquer under Koma Kansai II in Edo, and the painted treatment of the cat's fur carries the lacquer-painter's sensitivity to surface texture, the gradations of tone modulated to suggest the play of light across the coat. As a kacho-e painter, Zeshin extended the bird-and-flower repertory to include small mammals, and his treatments of cats and other domestic animals belong to the broader category of intimate observed subjects that Shijo album practice had developed. The cat operates as a subject for close looking, neither narrative nor emblematic but observed for its own pictorial interest, and the single-figure format places maximum demand on the artist's brushwork to carry the composition unaided. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the work (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/49310) as a representative document of Zeshin's animal painting in the Shijo manner.