Deer in the Snow

Deer in the Snow (雪中鹿図) is a hanging-scroll painting of 1930 by Tomita Keisen, in ink and color on silk, measuring 66 by 72 centimeters and held by the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (now Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art). The deer (shika) is one of the central animal motifs of Japanese painting, associated in classical poetry with the autumn season (through the bell of the calling stag) and in Buddhist iconography with the sacred deer of Nara, while a deer in snow specifically calls on the long tradition of winter animal subjects established by Maruyama Ōkyo and his Shijō successors in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kyoto. Keisen's treatment, painted in his fifty-first year, places the animal in a winter landscape rendered with the kind of close observation his Shijō training under Tsuji Kakō had taught him, while organizing the composition in the wide-format style and atmospheric distance characteristic of his mature manner. The work is reproduced in the museum's 2000 catalogue of one hundred masterpieces from its permanent collection and is one of the strongest examples of his late kachō-ga (bird-and-flower painting), the genre in which contemporary critics credited him with developing a new approach for the modern Japanese painting world.