Golden pheasants on a tree in the snow
| Support Type: | Silk |
| Paint Type: | Ink |
| Current Location: | Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Tokyo, Japan — it is part of the 30-scroll Dōshoku Sai-e and is designated a National Treasure of Japan. |
| Location History: | Ito Jakuchū donated Dōshoku Sai-e, including Golden Pheasants on a Tree in the Snow, to Shōkoku-ji Temple, Kyoto, in 1765, where the thirty-scroll set was preserved for over a century. During the Meiji period, financial difficulties and anti-Buddhist policies led Shōkoku-ji to relinquish the work to the Imperial Household. The official Sannomaru Shōzōkan record dates its presentation to the Court to 1890. It subsequently became part of the Imperial Collection and is now housed at the Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shōzōkan, Tokyo. |
What strikes me most about this painting is the strange tension between stillness and excess. Everything appears frozen in winter, yet almost nothing in the composition feels dead. The pheasants are intensely alive, their bodies crowded with colour and minute patterns, while the pink flowers push through the snow as if refusing the season’s logic. I find the snow particularly unsettling because it does not feel soft or weightless. It seems heavy, almost wet, making the entire landscape feel suspended between freezing and melting. There is also something almost theatrical about the way Jakuchū has arranged nature. The painting looks incredibly observant, but it does not feel like a straightforward record of a real place. The birds, branches, flowers and snow seem deliberately composed into an enclosed world where every detail demands attention. That makes the work feel less like a landscape and more like a meditation on life existing within, and despite, cycles of change. For me, the most powerful aspect is the coexistence of beauty and fragility. The pheasants’ extraordinary colours could easily turn the painting into an exercise in decorative splendour, but the surrounding snow constantly interrupts that brilliance. Life is vivid here precisely because it is surrounded by coldness and impermanence. The painting therefore feels less like an illustration of winter and more like a reminder that life does not disappear simply because the world around it has become still.