A painting of a fox in dried grass by Mori Tetsuzan mounted in pale beige silk patterned with vines and featuring bone rollers. Tetsuzan’s painting style blends the Kano-school training inherited from his father Shuho, the keen animal studies characteristic of his adoptive father Sosen, and the naturalistic realism of the Maruyama school. His works are marked by a distinctive ability to envelop his subjects in a rich atmospheric setting, creating compositions of notable emotional resonance. Although best known for animal subjects—like Sosen, but extending beyond monkeys to a wide range of less commonly depicted creatures—he approached each motif with refined observation and sensitivity. The scroll is 51 x 180 cm (20 x 71 inches). Nearly the entire silk canvas has been stained with water, perhaps some flood many decades ago, and has been cleaned and remounted in a more modern frame sensitive to the origins and comes enclosed in a wooden box.
Mori Tetsuzan (1775–1841) Mori Tetsuzan was a leading Osaka-based painter of the late Edo period, associated with both the Mori school and the Shijo-Maruyama tradition. Born in Funamachi, Osaka, as the son of Mori Shūhō, he was adopted by his uncle Mori Sosen, inheriting the Mori school lineage. His given name was Morimasa while Tetsuzan served as his artist’s sobriquet. A 1790 entry in Naniwa Kyōyūroku, written when he was only sixteen, already lists him alongside Shūhō and Sosen, indicating both his adoption into Sosen’s household and his emerging reputation. At Sosen’s encouragement he studied painting under Maruyama Ōkyo during the master’s final years, becoming one of the celebrated “Ten Disciples” of Ōkyo. In 1795, at the age of twenty-one, he contributed a small but notable Willow Tit panel to the famous set of wall paintings at Daijōji in Hyōgo. Based primarily in Osaka, Tetsuzan frequently visited the renowned literatus Kimura Kenkadō and traveled regularly between Osaka and Kyoto, helping to disseminate Maruyama-school painting in the region. In his later years he entered the service of the Hosokawa family of Kumamoto. Among his pupils were his eldest daughter Yanagi and her husband Mori Ippō, as well as Mori Kanzan, Mori Yūzan, Wada Gozan, and others who carried aspects of the Mori school into the late Edo and Meiji periods.
