Okimono or small sculpture, in the form of a black bear. Of hammered and cold-chiseled shibuichi or silver bronze, the chest inlaid in silver and the eyes in gold and shakudo. Signed on the reverse with a chiseled signature by the artist: Hoshu (Kihara Hoshu, active late 19th – early 20th century). Late Meiji era, circa 1900 – 1910.

Kihara Hoshu worked in Tokyo, in the Hana Koen Machi district of Ueno. A member of the Tokyo Chokin-kai or Tokyo Casting Association, he exhibited at the association’s Chokin Kyogi-kai or the Competitive Exhibition. Adept not just at casting but at hammering and chiseling work, in 1898 he showed a small sculptural vase in the form of a silk cocoon resting on a mulberry leaf with moths at the 13th Competitive Exhibition of the Sculpture Association (in the Works of Living Artists category).

This bear looks at us and smiles, friendly and content. The eyes gleam and focus straight ahead, framed by his alert but small ears and the rippling fur around his cheeks and head. The left back leg rests on its heel, as if paused from scratching his side in relief. The artist poses him calm and plump, covered in soft rippling fur.

This naturalistic rendering of a bear echoes images painted by artists such as Nishimura Goun. Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo opened in 1882; the Kyoto Municipal Zoo in 1903. These new venues allowed artists to study from life animals previously only seen or imagined in the wild. In 1907 – 1908, Goun painted a pair of folding screens now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which focus on a single Japanese black bear (in the left-hand screen) and on a pair of polar bears (in the right-hand screen). Goun’s black bear tumbles backward in the snow to lick his paw. It is almost as if the two artists sketched from the same outing to the zoo.

Light in weight, Kihara Hoshu’s bear is expertly cast shibuichi. Only the top casting artists were capable of producing a perfect casting of this weight.  Shibuichi was an expensive material.  Here it shimmers a rich, grey-black indicative of a particularly high silver content.  The lines of fur Hoshu carves with flowing lines of changing width and length, laying aside one chisel for another as a painter would a brush. Carved silver inlay collars the bear’s neck, almost invisible unless one picks up and handles the sculpture, as its tactile surface and wet eyes almost call out for. A tour-de-force of metalwork, as beautifully made as it is to touch, a sculpture with which Kihara Hoshu captures our smiles as perfectly as his bears’.