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Lot Essay
Jakuchu favored this auspicious combination of white cranes, pine and plum, emblems of the New Year. The long-necked bird is said to live a thousand years and has been an auspicious symbol in East Asia since Chinese antiquity—in Daoist lore, the crane shares the world of the immortals. Because of their lifetime monogamy, cranes also symbolize happy marriage. In this work, we see the familiar Manchurian crane (Grus Japonensis) with a red crest and snow-white plumage.
Jakuchu inherited his father’s greengrocery business but preferred to live the solitary life of a painter. Sometime in his early thirties he became interested in Zen Buddhism and met Daiten Kenjo (1719-1801), a scholar-monk who became abbot of Shokoku-ji, one of the five most important Zen monasteries in Kyoto. Daiten proved influential in the artist’s life going forward. Jakuchu is usually described as an idiosyncratic nonconformist, positioning him in stark contrast to the prevailing orthodox Kano lineage. However, his meticulously detailed paintings reveal his own conscientious reliance on Chinese prototypes. Daiten, his friend, patron and spiritual guide, made the Chinese works available to him. For example, the artist was able to study original paintings of cranes by the obscure fifteenth-century Chinese artist Wen Zheng that were preserved at Shokoku-ji. Jakuchu made a close copy of Wen Zheng’s pair of hanging scrolls of cranes, pine and plum.
The painting shown here is based on a hanging scroll in the Daiun-in Temple, Kyoto, by the sixteenth-century Chinese artist Chen Baichong. The Chinese model is more realistic and literal, with a distant waterfall suggesting spatial recession. Jakuchu, on the other hand, has an innate sense of abstraction and his work is bolder, more modern, with a striking originality. Matthew P. McKelway describes the genius of Jakuchu in his catalogue Traditions Unbound (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2005). He points out the tension between expressive brushwork as in the tree trunk, with its eye-like knots, and the more meticulously portrayed motifs of feathers and pine needles. The cranes are a filigree of hair-thin lines of gofun (powdered oyster shell), making them oddly transparent and flat. That same transparent quality—the glossy feathers with minuscule white lines of gofun—is seen in Jakuchu’s Cockatoo of circle 1755 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig.1).
Jakuchu is now a household name in Japan—exhibitions of his work are always blockbusters, and for good reason. Recently discovered in a private collection in the Kansai region of Japan, the painting shown here has never been published. Jakuchu used the seals on this painting for just a short time, early in his career—they appear on only three other paintings. There is a nearly identical painting of paired cranes and New Year’s rising sun by Jakuchu, with the same two seals, in the Tekisuikan Bunka Shinko Zaidan, in Chiba.
Jakuchu inherited his father’s greengrocery business but preferred to live the solitary life of a painter. Sometime in his early thirties he became interested in Zen Buddhism and met Daiten Kenjo (1719-1801), a scholar-monk who became abbot of Shokoku-ji, one of the five most important Zen monasteries in Kyoto. Daiten proved influential in the artist’s life going forward. Jakuchu is usually described as an idiosyncratic nonconformist, positioning him in stark contrast to the prevailing orthodox Kano lineage. However, his meticulously detailed paintings reveal his own conscientious reliance on Chinese prototypes. Daiten, his friend, patron and spiritual guide, made the Chinese works available to him. For example, the artist was able to study original paintings of cranes by the obscure fifteenth-century Chinese artist Wen Zheng that were preserved at Shokoku-ji. Jakuchu made a close copy of Wen Zheng’s pair of hanging scrolls of cranes, pine and plum.
The painting shown here is based on a hanging scroll in the Daiun-in Temple, Kyoto, by the sixteenth-century Chinese artist Chen Baichong. The Chinese model is more realistic and literal, with a distant waterfall suggesting spatial recession. Jakuchu, on the other hand, has an innate sense of abstraction and his work is bolder, more modern, with a striking originality. Matthew P. McKelway describes the genius of Jakuchu in his catalogue Traditions Unbound (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2005). He points out the tension between expressive brushwork as in the tree trunk, with its eye-like knots, and the more meticulously portrayed motifs of feathers and pine needles. The cranes are a filigree of hair-thin lines of gofun (powdered oyster shell), making them oddly transparent and flat. That same transparent quality—the glossy feathers with minuscule white lines of gofun—is seen in Jakuchu’s Cockatoo of circle 1755 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (fig.1).
Jakuchu is now a household name in Japan—exhibitions of his work are always blockbusters, and for good reason. Recently discovered in a private collection in the Kansai region of Japan, the painting shown here has never been published. Jakuchu used the seals on this painting for just a short time, early in his career—they appear on only three other paintings. There is a nearly identical painting of paired cranes and New Year’s rising sun by Jakuchu, with the same two seals, in the Tekisuikan Bunka Shinko Zaidan, in Chiba.