Bird on a Branch

Attributed to Shiokawa Bunrin and held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (36.100.4), Bird on a Branch is a hanging scroll painted in ink and color on silk that exemplifies the kachō-e (bird-and-flower picture) tradition as Bunrin and his Kyoto Shijō contemporaries practiced it during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. The single-bird-on-a-branch composition, with extensive empty silk surrounding the focal subject, derives from Chinese bird-and-flower painting precedents but had been thoroughly absorbed into the Japanese Shijō vocabulary by Bunrin's generation, where it carried the school's signature emphasis on close observation of natural form rendered through economical brushwork.