White Elephant and Other Beasts
(also known as Birds, Animals, and Flowers)

White Elephant and Other Beasts
(also known as Birds, Animals, and Flowers)

White Elephant and Other Beasts is a pair of six-fold painted screens, also known as byōbu, attributed to Itō Jakuchū (伊藤 若冲). The pair of screens depicts a variety of local, exotic, and mythical creatures. One of the pair is dedicated to depictions of mammals. Animals depicted include the giant white elephant, leopards, and tigers. The other is devoted to birds. The birds include a giant white phoenix, a massive rooster, and cranes. The colors are very saturated. Most of the forms are painterly, without lines. There is also no modeling to create the illusion of three-dimensionality. Each screen is painted with thousands of tiny squares. The resultant aesthetics create the illusion of a mosaic, or textile. It is the mosaic-like qualities of the screens that lead some art historians to question the authorship of the pair. Jakuchū was well known for the realism of his paintings, so these abstracted qualities are a fascinating deviation. In addition, the exotic, foreign beasts are a deviation from Jakuchū’s artistic philosophy. Typically, Jakuchū held that the best art was drawn from careful study of nature. However, elephants, porcupines, and water horses were not creatures Jakuchū could have observed. However, technical skill demonstrated by the thousands of mosaic squares is very similar to the gorgeous, detailed earlier compositions by Jakuchū, which leads many art historians to support this attribution.

Itō Jakuchū (伊藤 若冲)

private collection, but briefly exhibited by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

c. 1770 - 1780

Yamashita Yuji

public domain

pair of six-fold standing screens

Japanese

paint