Tiger (early to mid-1600s): Art, History and Details

Tiger (early to mid-1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Soga Nichokuan (Japanese).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A tiger looks upon a waterfall as it prowls out of a bamboo grove on this screen, and a dragon dives through clouds on the right. Tiger and dragon are traditional symbols of the balancing forces in the world, yin (the feminine aspect) and yang (the masculine aspect). This painting has a signature and seals, identifying it as a work by Soga Nichokuan, a painter thought to be from Sakai (near Osaka), and known primarily for his representations of hawk-eagles (kumataka).

Object facts

• Title: Tiger
• Date: early to mid-1600s
• Creator attribution: Soga Nichokuan (Japanese)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: six-panel folding screen; ink, slight color, gold, and silver on paper
• Dimensions: Painting only: 158.1 x 304.8 cm (62 1/4 x 120 in.); Including mounting: 173.4 x 377.2 cm (68 1/4 x 148 1/2 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1985.134.2

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Unfolding Beauty: Japanese Screens from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.
• Paget, Rhiannon. Divine Felines: The Cat in Japanese Art. Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2023.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.