Introduction

Why do the puppies in this painting look so alive? They were painted by Maruyama Ōkyo, who popularized shasei, which is a technique that involves painting directly from nature to imbue living creatures such as puppies and cranes with inner lives. When executed with flair, shasei results in a kind of magical realism, bringing living creatures to life to captivate viewers.

Buddhism teaches that all living beings—not just humans but also dogs, cats, monkeys, and even insects—are animated by spirits and consciously interact with their environments. This belief inspired Edo-period painters to imbue their creatures with emotions, whether those creatures be puppies conferring and cavorting with each other or a monkey contemplating a wasp. Although Western painters who are contemporaneous to the Edo period neither recognized nor depicted emotions in their animal subjects, recent scientific research suggests that animals may have individual personalities. Whether bold, shy, or sociable, their temperaments seem to affect how they interact with their environments.

Ōkyo and other shasei painters were not just painting what they saw with their eyes; they were also depicting their subjective experiences—what they felt in their hearts—to share their delight in frolicking puppies or their reverence for the moon rising through leaves of grass. They strove to capture their impressions of a fleeting moment in nature, exquisitely beautiful because it cannot last. Puppies must grow up into dogs and the rising moon must continue to rise into the darkening sky.