Page 20 - 2021 March 16th Japanese and Korean Art, Christie's New York City

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.
Fig. 1. Ito akuchu (1716-1800), Cockatoo. Japan. Edo period, 18th
century. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, William Sturgis Bigelow
Collection, 1911, 11.6938. Photograph © [February 2021] Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston