Artist: Shibata Zeshin
Date: 1872
Size: 187 x 113 cm
Museum: Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, United States)
Technique: Silk
Shibata Zeshin was the outstanding Japanese lacquer artist and painter of the nineteenth century. An energetic and prolific artist, he earned distinction during his lifetime for paintings that showed unusual creativity. Zeshin painted several works in which animals mimic human behavior. By demonstrating the apparent humanity of the animals, Zeshin creates a kinship between viewer and subject; and because monkeys naturally resemble man in their actions, they were a frequent choice of subject for works of this kind. Painted during Zeshin’s artistic maturity, Waterfall and Monkeys is exceptional for its monumentality of scale and concept. While both waterfalls and monkeys are popular as singular subjects in Japanese painting, this imaginative and humorous combination is unique. Zeshin creates a lively scene of a troop of young monkeys with their beleaguered mother, crawling about the craggy rocks at the base of a fast-flowing waterfall. The naturalness and variety of the monkeys’ poses and expressions suggest that Zeshin observed simian behavior firsthand. His interest in realism is further apparent in the delicate rendering of the monkeys’ fur, from the soft washes and short, fine lines that define the youngsters’ coats, to the longer, fluid strokes of the mother’s thick hair. A large and ambitious painting, Waterfall and Monkeys demonstrates Zeshin’s sure sense of space and compositional balance.
Artist |
|
|---|---|
Download |
|
Permissions |
Free for non commercial use. See below. |
 |
This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark. This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.
|
Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may
not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the
