Ukiyo-E Assignment: The Images

"Wagtail on a Cherry Branch"/Kuwagata Keisai



"Crow on a Branch"/Artist Unknown


Both images ©Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College. All Rights Reserved.


Since I use Chigago Formatting, I was not able to copy over my footnotes properly, much to my chagrin--these will be added as MLA shortly.

Lindsey Stone
2.11.2009
Visual Culture
Prof. Mizenko

Wagtail on a Cherry Branch/Crow on a Branch

Through they are both examples of the kachoga genre of painting of Ukiyo-e, Crow on a Branch and Wagtail on a Cherry Branch from the Berman Art Collection are distinctly different methods of taking a very similar subject and creating a very different artistic image out of two different artistic stylings. Kachoga, or flower-bird images, is a genre of art in Japan that can be traced back to the Kamakura Period. However, the first paintings that can really be called kachoga date from the Muromachi Period, where influences from Song China affected the manner in which Japanese paintings of the subject were made. In the Heian era, condensed poetry battles used images of birds and plants to evoke certain themes of seasonality or meaning in a highly controlled lexon of appropriate poetic terms, while painting of the subject has evolved into a diverse genre often picked up by various schools or artists at some point in their creative careers in traditional canons of art. From the start, this genre of painting has been highly influenced by Chinese scholarly traditions crossing the Japan Sea to a culture where China has been periodically considered the home of high culture trends.

Ukiyo-e’s kachoga genre prints draw on these traditions. This is appropriate when considering the rising popularity of painting in an Edo-era society of increasing merchant classes and the role of Ukiyo-e as a popular way for city-dwelling anyone to have a cultural artifact for themselves. Kachoga paintings on screens, or as aesthetic pieces, were a popular high-class object. The prints that became popular in the Edo-era were a way for those who could not afford these cultural artifacts to obtain these aesthetic pieces without paying the same amount of money. Trends in painting schools therefore found their way into Ukiyo-e art to be descimated to the ‘common masses’ that collected around the large cities where these prints were produced, such as Edo and Osaka.

Crow on a Branch is described as an image after the tradition of Shen Nanpin, a Chinese artist who entered Japan in 1731 and formed a school during his three-year stay in Edo out of his students and the Japanese artists who learned from him. Shen Nanpin revitalized the kachoga tradition by bringing over a realistic way of depicting animals and plants in paintings, instead of the more stylized ink-brushing cannon that grew out of the Zen Buddhist tradition. He is described as having a realistic style, using vivid color with the main focus of the image with highly nuanced detail, and with lush, full images of flowers and rocks rounding out his works. Considering these facts, the image of the crow on the branch is almost a rejection of this sort of stylistic integrity, or may actually predate this movement. Shen Nanpin’s works delicately use line to create form with volume, while the central figures are filled with careful washes of inks and pigment. In this print, the crow’s form emphasizes dark brush strokes and thick, heavy lines that imitate the classic ink-brush style not as closely related to Shen Nanpin’s realistic style. Instead of really being in the tradition of the original Shen Nanpin, this work is much more graphic and two-dimensional. However, it is still working within a genre that Shen Nanpin revitalized in popularity, and it’s small size might mean this was a derivative work made for a limited run, where the image may have been requested to not be in the delicate style of Shen Nanpin.

This treatment of the subject, however, emphasizes the symbolic meanings of the crow, as well as the stark nature of the branch he sits upon. Though this work has no artist named, the image of the crow on the barren branch can be found in prints by artists such as Keinen, Yasuda Bairei, and Shoson. The crow in Japanese symbology is often connected to death and the dead, as well as being an aesthetically striking figure when placed against a snow-drop background. Winter is the end of the seasons and the year, and so thematically a crow on a snow covered or barren branch harmonizes in the same way these images might have been used poetically to evoke certain seasons or life cycle periods. The heavy black lines with the added grey color are an intriguing attempt to imitate a strong ink-brush style of painting when gradation of that level of complexity could not have been technically achieved. Unlike most prints, this one uses broad areas of black to achieve this impression, and creates a flat, two dimensional silhouette of bird melding into branch. There’s no attempt at perspective or the realistic three-dimensionality common to Shen Nanpin’s work, or other prints on the same subject. However, the quality of the print is very high, though the layers of colors are fairly simple and uncomplicated which may indicate that it is an earlier print from the Ukiyo-e tradition. The flatness and bareness of the image work with the thematic elements of winter, and are graphically striking and can suggest a masculine heaviness of brushwork and method.

Compared to this, Wagtail on a Cherry Branch is much more in tune with the trend of kachoga that the Shen Nanpin school produced in painting, and that Ukiyo-e then took up as part of the kachoga genre. Wagtail is a work by Keisai Kuwagata, a member of the famous Kanou school of painting, who lived from 1764 – 1824 and was originally named Masayoshi Kitao. He was taught by Kitao Shigemasa, who was well known for his versatility in print-making, influenced by nishiki-e (brocade pictures) and Harunobu’s bijinga. The Kanou school of painting was one of the longest lived traditions in painting in Japan, started in the fifteenth century, and lasted into the nineteenth. The school was well known in the kachouga genre for creating a style of bright, flat colours that used a synthesis of Japanese and Chinese ink-painting style. Considering this background, the image of the wagtail is fairly subdued and controlled. It is sparing in its use of colour and delicate consideration of line, distinctly different then this kind of heritage might suggest. He also has a large amount of work focused on plants, birds, and insects, as well as books on how to paint. Information on Keisai is thin, partly due to this name change convention, and partly due to the fact he is most often cited as a successful student instead of as an artist. In addition, there seems to be a second Masayoshi from an earlier era, as well as naming conventions for dealing with his name change being uncertain. However, it seems he often created books of his work, which would explain the lack of a seal on the wagtail print itself since it would not have been required as part of a collection.

Wagtail is also curious because the word gabicho, though indeed a term for a bird, cannot be found to directly translate to the Japanese wagtail. The Japanese wagtail is a sharply colored bird, but here it is recreated in browns and tans which may be more a convention of the work than anything else. Though the color is relatively simple compared to the kinds of prints that were being produced at the time, like nishiki-e, the perspective of the bird on the branch is unusual. It is positioned to be seen from below, as a real viewer might actually witness the bird, creating a relationship with the audience that makes them less aware of the work of art and more as an act of representation. This is in contrast to the stark crow of the previous print, where the weight and use of line and brushwork was emphasized. There is a realism invoked in this choice of perspective that may have been influenced by both Shen Nanpin and the Western works that were trickling into Japan during this time. The wagtail is perched upon a cherry branch whose blossoms are reaching the end of their peak, a common theme in Ukiyo-E work that evokes the transient period of the end of spring. Sakura are, of course, a very heavy symbolic image that has been highly romanticized by this period. The wagtail in conjunction with this image, with the playful tilt of his tail, develops this idea of spring, and the warmth of the spring and summer seasons, in the same way the crow works with a barren tree to evoke the end of fall and winter.

What these works do through the use of the bird and the plant is create a specific sense of time by drawing on a lexicon of common imagery that had been developed through high culture in the periods before Edo. That the meaning and treatment of the birds match the intended meanings associated with them is not accident. Even the artistic treatment of the sources add to this created meaning of seasonality and connotation already existent in the literary and visual culture of the time period. The wagtail and sakura branches have light, delicate lines that emphasize the form and shape of the depicted elements. The sakura have begun to stop blooming in a delicate transition period, while the small, light weight bird perches briefly above the viewer’s head in a realistic depiction after Shen Nanpin. The composition is in a feminine sweeping curve. The crow is a heavy, large bird on a heavy, dark object, and the rendering of these two images in heavy, black ink emphasizes these characteristics as well as creates a sharp, striking imagery without any delicateness of composition. The constructed meanings of the plants and the birds, combined with the treatment in material and the composition, work to emphasize exactly those same constructed evoked images in the viewers mind and therefore make them more inclined to be drawn to the print. Since they understand the lexicon, they can read these images, and they then stand out more strikingly as a work to buy.