Cat Playing with a Toy Butterfly, from the series "Thirty-six Pictures of Birds (Sanjuroku kinzoku)"

This 1823 surimono by Totoya Hokkei, recorded in the Art Institute of Chicago, comes from the series Thirty-six Pictures of Birds (Sanjuroku kinzoku) and depicts a cat playing with a toy butterfly. Despite the series title's emphasis on birds, kyoka-e cycles of this scope often allowed designers and patrons to range more widely, and the cat — quintessentially playful and domestic — has long been a favored subject in Japanese decorative arts. The toy butterfly with which it tussles introduces a delicate seasonal note and an opportunity for displaying the deluxe printing techniques characteristic of surimono: mica or pearlescent pigments for the cat's coat, embossing for the butterfly's wings, fine graded color for the surrounding ground. Hokkei, one of the most accomplished pupils of the Hokusai school, was particularly adept at such intimate animal subjects, working within a tradition in which Katsushika Hokusai had himself produced numerous studies of cats, birds and insects. As an Edo kyoka-e commission, the sheet would have been printed in a small edition for members of a poetry club, who composed kyoka verses inscribed alongside the image. Within the Sanjuroku kinzoku series and Hokkei's broader surimono output, the print exemplifies the way the Hokusai school brought the close observation of animals into the literary and material refinement of nineteenth-century private printing.