CC BY 4.0
Morikuni Tachibana
Tiger in the Rain from the book Treasure-bag Picture Book, 1770
About the object
The page originates from a book containing hints for amateur painters. Tigers were extremely popular motifs in Japanese painting, but there were no live specimens in Japan. In order to get a sense of their appearance, people used their skins as a guide. This meant that the animal's coat was reproduced true to life, but anatomically and in terms of their characters, the animals looked more like gigantic domestic cats.