Tyger Tyger, Burning Bright

2010 is the Year of the Tiger, and I like to celebrate these fierce and incredibly 

beautiful creatures through the painted scrolls of Itō Jakuchū (1716-1800), a masterful 

and innovative Japanese artist of the Edo period. His tigers strike me for their 

wonderful combination of elegance, expressiveness and power. Jakuchū usually 

painted animals from life, but since there were no tigers in Japan at the time, 

these portraits were copied from or inspired by Chinese artworks.

All of the artworks in this post belong to Etsuko and Joe Price, who were responsilbe 

for rediscovering Jakuchū and other Edo painters in the 1950s, a time when they were

 very little known or valued in Japan and abroad. In 2007 part of their impressive

 collection of screens and hanging scrolls toured major Japanese museums, and was 

later exhibited at the Smithsonian and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Jakuchū was a practicing Zen Buddhist, and many of his major works were created 

for Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines across Japan. In his old age he became a lay monk

 at the temple of Sekiho-ji in the outskirts of Kyoto. "In Zen thinking, the tiger represents

 a natural power that can be controlled through enlightenment seeking discipline. 

In the act of grooming, the tiger suggests a self-intention to move beyond a conflicted

 mental state and toward a focus of energy" (from the Smithsonian's exhibition website).