Crabs and Peonies

This double-sided, freestanding screen, known as a tsuitate in Japanese, features a pair of ink paintings by one of early-modern Japan’s most imaginative and celebrated painters, Itō Jakuchū. On the front side of the screen, Jakuchū offers a slow, quiet scene, where three crabs of varying sizes—a large red king crab and a pair of smaller Japanese mitten crabs—seem to pass idly by one another on a grassy beach. The varied textures and colors of the crabs’ bodies serve as a playground for one of Jakuchū’s favorite ink-painting techniques, the so-called boneless method, mokkotsu, where he forgoes contour lines in favor of using carefully gradated and layered ink washes to define form. On the verso, Jakuchū shows a grassy embankment where a clump of peonies is buffeted violently by the wind, its lower leaves and heavy blossoms twisted around a garden rock.