Picture Book of Crawling Creatures (The Insect Book) (Ehon mushi erami) 画本虫撰

Kitagawa Utamaro 喜多川歌麿

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Utamaro was a pupil of the Kanō school painter Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788). Each double-page illustration of insects and reptiles has a pair of kyōka—"comic poems on the feelings of love"—inspired by the images. Here, the kyōka involve an evening cicada and a spider: Evening cicada, is it you who steals the right moment to fly into another's arms? But you cry constantly like a poor soul living one day at a time. A spider returning to his nest reminds me Of a man furtively dragging his clothes and creeping up to a lady's boudoir.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art