Mori Ransai

Mori Buncho, a painter who called himself Ransai, was trained in the style of Shen Quan (1682-1760?), a Chinese artist active in the Japanese port of Nagasaki between 1731 and 1733. Ransai studied painting with Shen’s pupil, Kumashiro Yuhi (1713-72), and this 1801 edition is the continuation of Ransai’s 1782 compilation of their painting instructions and compositional models. The inscription at the bottom right distinguishes this bird from another illustration because it has “an entirely skinny and long body and also a long tail.”

Ransai is one of the earliest Japanese artists to design prints that translate the nuances of the painted brushstroke into the medium of the woodcut. By emphasizing surface patterning in the seemingly naturalistic Chinese compositions on which his compositions were based, Ransai also heightened the abstract qualities of line in his illustrations. These studies reflect the Chinese professional painting tradition, as it was transmitted to Japan in the eighteenth century and imitated there.