Two panels of this brilliant gold-leaf screen are balanced with contrasting scenes of two egrets at rest and three crows in flight, with white and black forms counterbalancing each other to mesmerizing effect. The white color of the egrets was accomplished by cutting out the gold leaf layer and exposing the paper, a technique the artist also used on other examples of avian painting. Zeshin, a master lacquerer, also earned esteem for his paintings using lacquer, a medium decidedly more challenging to work with than standard pigments. This tour-de-force painting was recorded by the Zeshin expert Goke Tadaomi in Masterpieces of Shibata Zeshin (Shibata Zeshin meihinshū, 1981) when it was still mounted as two separate framed wooden panels.
