Banana Tree and Sparrow (Bananier et moineau)

Banana Tree and Sparrow (Bananier et moineau in the French cataloguing of its current owner) is a c. 1920 hanging-scroll painting by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color on silk, now held by the Musée Cernuschi in Paris — the dedicated Asian-art museum of the City of Paris founded in 1898 from the collection of Henri Cernuschi and a central institution for the study of Japanese painting outside Japan. The composition pairs a single sparrow with a large banana plant (bashō, 芭蕉), one of the recurring motifs of East Asian poetic and painting tradition: the banana leaf, easily torn by wind and rain, had long been a metaphor in Chinese and Japanese poetry for the impermanence and exposure of human life, while the sparrow belongs to the standard cast of small birds in the kachō-e (bird-and-flower) repertoire. Kakō's treatment reflects the Maruyama-Shijō habits he had absorbed under his teacher Kōno Bairei: careful sketching from life of the sparrow's posture and plumage, generous negative space, and soft outline through the banana's broad leaves. The work entered the Cernuschi collection in the twentieth century and is one of the principal Kakō paintings in a major European institutional collection.