Rooster, Hen, and Chicks

This color woodblock print, dated by the Cleveland Museum of Art to the 1880s, depicts a rooster, hen, and chicks - a classic farmyard subject treated by Zeshin with the close naturalistic observation he had absorbed from his Maruyama-Shijo training under Suzuki Nanrei. The rooster and his family had specific symbolic associations in East Asian art (the rooster's five Confucian virtues, the family as an emblem of domestic harmony), but Zeshin's primary interest in such subjects was visual: the textures of feathers, the alertness of a bird's eye, the comedy of a chick. The print belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1985.362), where it is dated to circa the 1880s. By this period Zeshin was internationally recognized for his lacquer paintings and his small but exceptional output of prints, and bird-and-flower compositions of this kind were collected as fine art rather than as ephemeral popular prints, particularly by the foreign collectors who first brought his work to Western museums.