Insects and Grasses

Insects and Grasses is a handscroll by Yamamoto Baiitsu in ink and color on silk, dated 1847 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 1995.247). The handscroll format, slowly unrolled section by section, is the format most closely associated in East Asian painting with intimate connoisseurship and with the scholar's careful inspection of small natural-history subjects, and Baiitsu's roll presents a sequence of insects (butterflies, cicadas, dragonflies, beetles) among grasses, flowering plants, and weeds typical of the Japanese countryside in late summer and early autumn. Painted in the artist's sixty-fourth year, the scroll is a mature demonstration of his "boneless" (mokkotsu) brushwork, in which colored wash takes the place of outline and the volume of small creatures and plant forms is built up directly from the inked brush. The Met's curatorial note describes it as a painting from his mature period that shows his mastery of the boneless technique and his deft powers of observation — the standard literati ideals of close natural-history attention combined with calligraphic economy. The scroll was acquired by the museum in 1995 and is one of the most frequently exhibited examples of Baiitsu's small-subject painting.