Grasshopper on Flowering Plant

Grasshopper on Flowering Plant is an early twentieth-century hanging-scroll painting by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color on silk, depicting a single grasshopper resting on a stem of flowering plant — one of the small, intimately scaled kachō-e (bird-and-flower) subjects that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition treated as a serious vehicle for shasei (sketching from life) discipline. Insect studies had a long history in East Asian painting, ranging from the great Edo-period insect albums of Kitagawa Utamaro and Maruyama Ōkyo through the Meiji natural-history compendia in which painters like Imao Keinen and Watanabe Seitei recorded the small fauna of Japan with the seriousness of zoological draughtsmen. Kakō's treatment in this scroll applies the close observation of leg articulation, antennae, and wing-cases that the Shijō tradition demanded — habits he had absorbed under his teacher Kōno Bairei — to a motif charged with seasonal and literary associations: the chirping grasshopper of autumn nights, a fixed motif of classical Japanese waka poetry. The composition's restrained outline and generous negative space typify his approach to small kachō-e subjects and place the work within the wider Kyoto nihonga tradition of seriously observed insect-and-plant studies.