Lot Essay
The curious shapes of this landscape and the implied violence of the birds of prey give the painting an eerie force and dramatic intensity. The painting is attributed to Soga Nichokuan (or Chokuan II), an enigmatic artist about whom very little is known. Active until the middle of the seventeenth century, he was an eccentric loner, a disturbing but compelling personality whose portraits of hawks have strength and tension tempered by a refined sensitivity to detail.
Judging from the name he used, Nichokuan was probably the son of Soga Chokuan, an independant artist active around 1570-1610 who is said to have worked in Echizen Province (modern Fukui) for the Asakura daimyo family. Sometime after the downfall of their house Chokuan moved to the thriving port city of Sakai, just south of present-day Osaka, where he founded a school specializing in bird and flower painting. Many of his paintings bear inscriptions by Buddhist monks. Although he often depicted hawks on pine trees, a subject favored by the newly rich military rulers of the Momoyama era, his style is suprisingly conservative if compared with the work of Nichokuan.
In both screens a stream surges toward us and a gnarled tree reaches out from the corner to frame the central hawk. On the right a hawk is posed attentively awaiting its plummetig mate with beak open, feet firmly planted on an elevated rocky pedestal. A canopy of dark foliage overhead sets him off as a mighty conqueror. The tense scenario continues on the left screen where a triumphant predator has its prey, a large pheasant, locked firmly in a death vise. The pheasant has already gone limp, and the hawk has one talon wedged deep in the bird's open beak.
Nichokuan has masterful control of ink tonalities. He delights in contrasting the delicate mosaic patterning of the birds' feathers with the bold ink washes and sharp cutting strokes of the trees and rocks. Especially striking in his work are the suggestive - one might even say anthropomorphic - shapes of the rocks and trees. The knobby protruberances and contortions of the tree limbs, in particular, gives the painting a surreal quality that is unusual in Japanese art. The pine needles wiggle like spider's legs, and the abstracted, geometric rock forms hover over the stream like long-nosed gnomes.
In these screens the militant personalities of the hawks and the ominous forms of the landscape clearly take precedence over the seasonal imagery.
The painting is closely related to the pair of screens of Hawks attributed to Nichokuan in the collection of Tokyo University of Fine Arts, illustrated in Momoyama, Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized in collaboration with the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government (1975), cat. no. 23
Judging from the name he used, Nichokuan was probably the son of Soga Chokuan, an independant artist active around 1570-1610 who is said to have worked in Echizen Province (modern Fukui) for the Asakura daimyo family. Sometime after the downfall of their house Chokuan moved to the thriving port city of Sakai, just south of present-day Osaka, where he founded a school specializing in bird and flower painting. Many of his paintings bear inscriptions by Buddhist monks. Although he often depicted hawks on pine trees, a subject favored by the newly rich military rulers of the Momoyama era, his style is suprisingly conservative if compared with the work of Nichokuan.
In both screens a stream surges toward us and a gnarled tree reaches out from the corner to frame the central hawk. On the right a hawk is posed attentively awaiting its plummetig mate with beak open, feet firmly planted on an elevated rocky pedestal. A canopy of dark foliage overhead sets him off as a mighty conqueror. The tense scenario continues on the left screen where a triumphant predator has its prey, a large pheasant, locked firmly in a death vise. The pheasant has already gone limp, and the hawk has one talon wedged deep in the bird's open beak.
Nichokuan has masterful control of ink tonalities. He delights in contrasting the delicate mosaic patterning of the birds' feathers with the bold ink washes and sharp cutting strokes of the trees and rocks. Especially striking in his work are the suggestive - one might even say anthropomorphic - shapes of the rocks and trees. The knobby protruberances and contortions of the tree limbs, in particular, gives the painting a surreal quality that is unusual in Japanese art. The pine needles wiggle like spider's legs, and the abstracted, geometric rock forms hover over the stream like long-nosed gnomes.
In these screens the militant personalities of the hawks and the ominous forms of the landscape clearly take precedence over the seasonal imagery.
The painting is closely related to the pair of screens of Hawks attributed to Nichokuan in the collection of Tokyo University of Fine Arts, illustrated in Momoyama, Japanese Art in the Age of Grandeur, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized in collaboration with the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government (1975), cat. no. 23