Feathered Ink

Across three galleries, Feathered Ink explores how Japanese artists have experimented over several centuries with different brush techniques in their depictions of avian subjects. Drawing from the Freer Gallery of Art’s extensive collection of bird-and-flower paintings, the exhibition includes hanging scroll paintings, folding screens, ceramics, and printed books.

In Japan, paintings on the theme of birds and flowers began to appear during the Heian period (794–1185) as a way of referencing seasonal associations or auspicious homonyms or of replicating the natural world in remarkable detail. Depicting a variety of bird species in naturalistic or paradisiacal environments offers a tantalizing opportunity for an artist to showcase their skills through the use of virtuosic ink brushwork techniques to represent different feather types and the textures of plumage and foliage. Adding colors can provide further layers of symbolic meaning and decorative effect. Birds are also popular motifs found on early modern Japanese ceramics, rendered through inlaid slip designs, molding, and polychrome pigments. Some of the vessels in this exhibition even provide a glimpse into how Japanese potters emulated the painterly effects of ink on clay surfaces.

Video

Join us as we examine this four-paneled screen painting by Maruyama Ōkyo, the eighteenth-century artist who made realism a part of Japanese art. We discuss how Ōkyo used negative space to depict geese taking flight and how he evoked the feeling of a chilly morning on the seashore. We also muse on the painting’s original use as a sliding door and what the rest of the room may have looked like.

Speakers: Dr. Frank Feltens, Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Japanese Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Steven Zucker, Smarthistory

Maruyama Ōkyo (1733–1795); Geese Over a Beach; Japan, 18th century; ink on paper; 176.7 × 372 cm; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Collection, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1898.143