Few coun­tries love cats as much as Japan does, and none express­es that love so clear­ly in its var­i­ous forms of art. Though not eter­nal, the Japan­ese incli­na­tion toward all things feline does extend deep­er into his­to­ry than some of us might assume. “In the sixth cen­tu­ry, Bud­dhist monks trav­elled from Chi­na to Japan,” writes Philip Kennedy at Illus­tra­tion Chron­i­cles. On these jour­neys, they brought scrip­tures, draw­ings, and relics – items that they hoped would help them intro­duce the teach­ings of Bud­dhism to the large island nation.” They also brought cats, in part as car­ri­ers of good luck and in part for their abil­i­ty to “guard the sacred texts from the hun­gry mice that had stowed on board their ships.”

Bud­dhism made a last­ing mark on Japan­ese cul­ture, but those cats prac­ti­cal­ly over­took it. “Today, cats can be found near­ly every­where in Japan,” Kennedy writes. “From spe­cial cafés and shrines to entire cat islands. Indeed the own­ers of one Japan­ese train sta­tion were so enam­ored with their cat that they appoint­ed her sta­tion­mas­ter.”

By the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the ukiyo‑e wood­block print mas­ter Uta­gawa Kuniyoshi could keep a stu­dio over­run with cats and not seem too ter­ri­bly eccen­tric for it. “His fond­ness for felines crept into his work, and they appear in many of his finest prints. Some­times they crop up as char­ac­ters from well-known sto­ries; oth­er times, they are beau­ti­ful­ly expres­sive stud­ies.”

Kuniyoshi made his name illus­trat­ing tales of his­tor­i­cal war­riors, but his artis­tic capac­i­ty also encom­passed “every­thing from land­scapes and ani­mals to ghost­ly appari­tions and scenes from pop­u­lar kabu­ki the­atre.” When the Toku­gawa Shogu­nate sensed its pow­er declin­ing in the 1840s, it banned such “lux­u­ries” as the depic­tions of kabu­ki actors (as well as geisha).

To accom­mo­date that demand, Kuniyoshi cre­at­ed humanoid cats endowed with fea­tures resem­bling well-known per­son­ages of the era. This in addi­tion to his series Neko no ate­ji, or “cat homo­phones,” with cats arranged to spell the names of fish, and Cats Sug­gest­ed As The Fifty-three Sta­tions of the Tōkaidō, a feline par­o­dy of Hiroshige’s ear­li­er Fifty-three Sta­tions of the Tōkaidō. Rat-eat­ing aside, cats aren’t known as espe­cial­ly use­ful ani­mals, but many a Japan­ese artist can attest to their inspi­ra­tional val­ue even today.

A col­lec­tion of Kuniyoshi’s prints fea­tur­ing cats can be found in the book, Cats in Ukiyo‑e: Japan­ese Wood­block Print.

via Illus­tra­tion Chron­i­cles

Relat­ed con­tent:

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

Insane­ly Cute Cat Com­mer­cials from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, Hayao Miyazaki’s Leg­endary Ani­ma­tion Shop

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Two Cats Keep Try­ing to Get Into a Japan­ese Art Muse­um … and Keep Get­ting Turned Away: Meet the Thwart­ed Felines, Ken-chan and Go-chan

Dis­cov­er the Kat­tenK­abi­net: Amsterdam’s Muse­um Devot­ed to Works of Art Fea­tur­ing Cats

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In the nine­teen-twen­ties, as George Orwell remem­bers it, “Paris was invad­ed by such a swarm of artists, writ­ers, stu­dents, dilet­tan­ti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has prob­a­bly nev­er seen. In some quar­ters of the town the so-called artists must actu­al­ly have out­num­bered the work­ing pop­u­la­tion.” Along stretch­es of the Seine, “it was almost impos­si­ble to pick one’s way between the sketch­ing-stools.” Legit­i­mate or oth­er­wise, these artists were gen­uine descen­dants of Claude Mon­et, at least in the sense that the lat­ter pio­neered paint­ing en plein air, dis­till­ing art direct­ly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pig­ments or buy paints con­tained in frag­ile pig blad­ders,” says Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much eas­i­er to work in a stu­dio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flex­i­ble zinc tubes invent­ed by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a porta­bil­i­ty that made out­door paint­ing easy and fea­si­ble.” As usu­al in moder­ni­ty, a devel­op­ment in tech­nol­o­gy enabled a devel­op­ment in cul­ture, but to show what kind of pos­si­bil­i­ties had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazen­ness: more specif­i­cal­ly, an artist like Mon­et.

“Obsessed, most of all, with light and col­or, and the ways they reg­is­ter in the human mind,” Mon­et “reject­ed the pop­u­lar con­ven­tions of his time, which pri­or­i­tized line, col­or, and blend­ed brush­strokes that con­cealed the artist’s hand in favor of sev­er­al short, thick appli­ca­tions of sol­id col­or placed side by side, large­ly unblend­ed.” His paint­ings, which we now cred­it with launch­ing the Impres­sion­ist move­ment, show us not so much col­ors as “col­or rela­tion­ships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the can­vas.” But then, so does real life, whose con­stant­ly chang­ing light ensures that “every few min­utes, we expe­ri­ence a sub­tly dif­fer­ent col­or palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Mon­et’s artis­tic enter­prise more clear­ly demon­strat­ed than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series con­sists of 25 paint­ings depict­ing just what that name sug­gests (and which, belong­ing to Mon­et’s neigh­bor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each paint­ed at a dif­fer­ent time of day. Each image rep­re­sents Mon­et’s attempt to cap­ture the light col­ors just as he per­ceived them at a par­tic­u­lar moment, straight from nature. Tak­en togeth­er, they con­sti­tute “maybe the defin­i­tive expres­sion of the Impres­sion­ist move­ment” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we nev­er tru­ly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now pur­chase a copy of the Nerd­writer’s new book, Escape into Mean­ing: Essays on Super­man, Pub­lic Bench­es, and Oth­er Obses­sions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Mon­et to Paint His Final Mas­ter­pieces & Cre­ate “the World’s First Art Instal­la­tion”

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.