Page 129 - Designing_Nature_The_Rinpa_Aesthetic_in_Japanese_Art Metropolitan Museum PUB

In Japanese poetry and painting, birds typically have literary
or other auspicious associations and are traditionally paired with a specific sea-
son, sometimes even a particular month of the lunar calendar. As with flowers

and blossoming trees, poetic conventions evolved so that a given species could
function as a succinct “season word” (kigo) in the laconic forms of Japanese verse:
thirty-one-syllable waka (court poetry) or the even more compact seventeen-

syllable haiku. Bush warblers, for example, herald the spring, while cormorants
and cuckoos get noticed in summer; wild geese migrate in autumn, and wild
ducks and plovers are associated with winter.
The conventions created for poetry were readily transferred to painting, espe-
cially since the audiences for both art forms were generally one and the same. The

Sōtatsu studio of the early seventeenth century made ink paintings of birds (cranes,
herons, ducks, and domestic fowl) as well as other auspicious animals (dogs,
tigers, oxen, and rabbits, to name just a few) part of their standard repertoire.

Examples of Sōtatsu’s ink painting on avian themes include an expressive image
of a waterfowl in flight over waves (cat. 49). Accompanying the painting is a
BIRDS poem by the celebrated courtier-calligrapher Karasumaru Mitsuhiro on the

theme of a grebe (nio or kaitsuburi) glimpsed amid roiling water, not on wing,

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