An Elegant Series of Amulet Paintings (Furyu nanatsume e awase): Rabbit and Cock

Held by the Art Institute of Chicago in the Clarence Buckingham Collection, this ōban color woodblock print from the series An Elegant Series of Amulet Paintings (Fūryū nanatsume e-awase) pairs two figures of the Chinese zodiac — Rabbit and Cock — into a single decorative design built on the formal logic of the matched-pictures (awase) genre. The awase tradition reached back into Heian court culture, where contest-of-pairs games (mono-awase) ranked from poetry to incense to seashells, and the late-Edo print market repeatedly revived the structure as a frame for [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and kachō-e compositions. Shūchō's design uses the rabbit-cock pairing both as auspicious zodiac symbolism and as a graphic device, the curved white form of the rabbit playing against the upright crested silhouette of the rooster. The print belongs to a small group of Shūchō zodiac-pair compositions held in part by the MFA Boston (whose Bigelow Collection preserves additional sheets including Ox and Goat, Dog and Dragon, Snake and Boar, and Monkey and Tiger from related or parallel series), making the Art Institute's Rabbit and Cock part of a documentable subseries of his decorative output.