Rabbit and Roses

This depiction of a crouching rabbit and a leaning boulder from behind which two clusters of roses emerge, combines the effect of brilliant polychrome on the leaves and blossoms with lighter washes of ink and color on the rock and the fur of the rabbit. It bears the stylistic hallmarks of the Edo period’s Nagasaki school of painting which was based stylistically on the work of Shen Nanpin (also known as Shen Quan, fl. 1725–80), a Chinese artist who lived in Japan, in the port city of Nagasaki, from 1731 to 1733, and other Chinese painters who visited Japan during the eighteenth century. The pictorial elements are carefully and meticulously detailed, and are concentrated within one side of the picture plane, a Chinese convention used in bird-and-flower and plant and animal paintings from the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) on.

The artist Mori Ransai, who specialized in the bird-and-flower genre, was one of several Japanese painters who mastered this Chinese style of depicting close-up images of nature in a naturalistic but richly decorative manner against a background of blank silk. The inscription above the image was brushed by Jiun Onkō, one of the premier Buddhist scholars, writers, and reformers of the Edo period. A cleric concerned with monastic discipline and ethics, he authored a number of works on the subject, and was also one of Japan’s most accomplished Sanskrit scholars.