Important Cultural PropertyEagle object

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  • By Suzuki Chōkichi
  • 1 piece
  • Bronze
  • Meiji 25 (1892)
  • Tokyo National Museum
  • E-13034

This is a vivid representation of an eagle on a rock aiming at its prey with its eyes opened wide. Every feather and the skin texture of the wrinkled legs are accurately cast. This minute description is enabled by ceroplastics.  
Suzuki Chokichi is an authority on this technique in the Meiji period. He was born in 1848 in Iruma, Musashi (current Kawagoe, Saitama) and learned ceroplastics under Okano Toryusai in Edo. In the Meiji period when Chokichi actively engaged in creative activities, new industries were strongly encouraged and promoted as a national policy and many craft products were exported. Chokichi was deeply involved in the policy and became the first supervisor of the casting department of Kiryu Kosho Gaisha, a company established in 1874 to export craft products overseas. Chokichi was particularly good at casting birds of prey like this one and actively submitted them to domestic and international exhibitions. This eagle was submitted to the world exposition held in Chicago in 1893 and gained a high reputation.

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