Cormorant Fishing Boats

Cormorant Fishing Boats (鵜飼図) is a hanging-scroll painting of 1912 by Tomita Keisen depicting the famous ukai (cormorant fishing) of the Nagara River at Gifu, a practice that runs from May to October each year in which fishermen on torch-lit boats use trained cormorants to catch ayu (sweetfish) for the imperial table. The Nagara cormorant fishery is one of the most enduring images of Japanese summer night fishing, recorded in poetry from at least the eighth-century Man'yōshū and depicted by painters and printmakers across the centuries. Keisen's treatment, painted in his early thirties and dating from the late Meiji or first year of the Taishō era, draws on the nanga literati landscape tradition he had absorbed under Tsuji Kakō and Kinoshita Itsuun: a tall, narrow composition in which the boats float as small focal points within a much larger atmospheric river view, the figures rendered with economical brushwork and the water surface left largely to suggestive negative space. The image is one of his earliest engagements with the specific landscapes of central Japan and shows him beginning to develop the synthesis of nanga, Rinpa, and observed Japanese subject matter that would mark his mature work.