Tigers�and the Kishi School of Japanese Painting
Abstract
"This tenth-century Japanese poem, curiously similar to the western admonition about telling a tiger by its stripes, might be applied to the tradition of tiger painting in Japan -- it is much more than a topography of dots and lines. Tigers were indigenous to China and Korea, but not to Japan. The absence of the real animal, coupled with the mythical associations that the tiger image possessed upon its introduction to Japan in the prehistoric period, posed special problems for the painter. A tiger by Kishi Renzan (1805-1859) in the collections of the Museum of Art and Archaeology of the University of Missouri-Columbia nevertheless succeeds in evoking both traditional attributes of the beast together with a naturalism new to Japanese painting."--First paragraph.
Citation
Originally published in: Muse, 1989-1090, volume 23-24, pages 100-111
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