Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Kishi Ganku was a noted Japanese painter of the late Edo period. He studied various styles of painting, including the Kano style and the bird-and-flower painting of Chinese artist Shen Nanpin, who visited Japan in 1731. Later, under the Maruyama-Shijō school of painting he developed his own realistic style, using short, choppy but elegant brush strokes to build up a dense picture, and founded the Kishi school. He painted portraits, landscapes, flowers, birds and animals, and is perhaps best known for his paintings of tigers. He may well never have seen a live tiger, but he is known to have owned a tiger skin.