Deer by Mountain Stream

Deer by Mountain Stream is a hanging-scroll painting by Taki Katei, signed and dated January 1896 and executed in ink and color on silk, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 1981.26). It was produced at the height of Katei's late career, three years after his 1893 appointment as Imperial Household Artist (Teishitsu Gigeiin) and at the moment when his densely colored saimitsuga (fine-detail painting) style was at its most virtuosic. The composition pairs the standard Chinese-derived literati subject of deer in a mountain landscape with the meticulous bird-and-flower technique on silk for which Katei was best known: each leaf, branch, and patch of the deer's pelt is drawn with the exhaustive attention that pushed his late work to the limits of the silk-and-color medium. The deer subject carried specific symbolic weight in the Sino-Japanese tradition that Katei inherited from his teacher Ōoka Unpō, associated with longevity, with the Daoist immortals, and with the ancient Chinese painting subjects that Katei had spent decades studying in temple and private collections. The work is one of the principal examples of Katei's mature manner in any American collection.