Cock Eyeing a Free-standing Screen Painted with Cock, Hen, and Chicks, from Spring Rain Surimono Album (Harusame surimono-jō), vol. 1

A surimono of probably 1813 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, this print depicts a live cock eyeing a freestanding screen painted with a cock, a hen, and chicks — a visual joke (mitate) in which the represented bird confronts the painted simulacrum, with the chickens of the screen functioning as both decoy and family-portrait counterpoint to the real bird outside it. The probable 1813 date — early in Shigenobu's career, around the period of his marriage to Hokusai's daughter — makes this print a useful marker of his early style and of the studio idiom that he was inheriting from his master at this point. The play between live subject and pictorial double belongs to the broader Edo taste for trompe-l'œil and visual paradox that runs from Ōkyo's experiments earlier in the eighteenth century through to the late ukiyo-e mitate; Shigenobu treats it economically, in the small surimono format, with restrained color and careful attention to the screen's painted detail. As a New Year's surimono — 1813 was a year of the rooster in the twelve-year cycle — the print would have carried the symbolic charge of a zodiac-animal greeting card alongside its conceptual joke.