Rooster and Hen, from the series "Album of Twelve Zodiacal Animals by the Artist Seiho (Seiho gahaku hitsu junishi cho)"

Rooster and Hen, from the album Seihō Gahaku Hitsu Jūnishi-jō (Album of Twelve Zodiacal Animals by the Artist Seihō), is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1954.205; catalogue at https://www.artic.edu/artworks/80371) and represents the tori (cock) year of the East Asian zodiac. The composition is a horizontal sheet, approximately 25.8 by 38.4 cm — Takeuchi Seihō and his Kyoto carvers used a mix of vertical and horizontal formats across the twelve animals — and shows the rooster and hen in close grouping, the cock's tail feathers and comb defined in confident sumi line and accented with red, the hen tucked beneath in a softer wash of grey and ochre. The pictorial source is a typical Shijō-school bird-and-flower study of the kind Seihō produced throughout his career, descended through his teacher Kōno Bairei from the eighteenth-century Maruyama-Shijō tradition of careful observation combined with calligraphic economy. Like the other plates in the album, the print preserves the brush movement of the original ink painting; the woodblock medium serves not to translate the design into print-graphic vocabulary but to reproduce, as faithfully as possible, the look of a brush original on paper. The Art Institute's impression dates to the c. 1930s-40s edition of the album, which corresponds to a later Unsōdō reissue of the Yamada Naosaburō / Geisōdō original. Roosters were a recurring Bairei-school subject, treated as exercises in handling iridescent plumage and the sculptural geometry of comb and wattle; Seihō's version belongs to that pedagogical tradition while turning the pair into a domestic vignette through their close grouping, a quietly observational touch in line with the broader synthesis of Maruyama-Shijō method and post-European realism that defined his mature Kyoto nihonga practice.