Rabbit

Rabbit, dated 1868 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/49330), is a small kacho subject by Shibata Zeshin from the Edo-to-Meiji transition year, extending the Shijo observational program into the small-mammal repertory through a single-figure animal study. The rabbit had been a recurring subject in Japanese painting, associated with autumn and with the lunar legends that placed a rabbit on the moon, and Shijo painters had absorbed the subject into their broader observational program of small animals treated with the school's calligraphic economy. Zeshin's training under Suzuki Nanrei and Okamoto Toyohiko in Kyoto had given him the manner for handling such intimate animal subjects, and the composition renders the rabbit with the rounded volume of its body and the alert attention of its head drawn through assured brushwork. His earliest training under Koma Kansai II in lacquer had instilled in him a sensitivity to surface texture that carries into the painted treatment of the rabbit's fur, the brushwork modulating tone to suggest the play of light across the coat. By 1868 Zeshin was in his sixty-first year, and works of this date capture him at the transitional moment when the Edo political order was giving way to the Meiji era. The single-figure animal format places maximum demand on the brushwork to carry the composition unaided, and the leaf accordingly reads as an exercise in the kind of compressed economy that Shijo album practice had developed. The rabbit's particular association with lunar legend and with the autumn season gave the subject additional poetic resonance that the kacho-e tradition had cultivated. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the work as a representative document of Zeshin's late-career engagement with the small-mammal subject in the Shijo manner.