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Tigers

 THE TIGER WAS AN IMAGINARY ANIMAL TO THE JAPANESE. They had seen tiger skins, and thus depicted the fur with extreme fidelity to nature, but it was in their attempt to round this fur into a stalking ferocious beast that their ability was stretched. If you have seen a tiger skin, you will notice that during the drying process, the eye socket shrinks outward and is therefore large, while on the other hand, the ears shrink inward and become small. When skinned, a tigers nose becomes flat and their paws become huge. All of these odd proportions become standard characteristics as the artist used his imagination to give life to an inanimate rug. Jakuchu, in his famous painting of a tiger actually apologizes on the the face of the scroll; "I only paint from life, but there are no ferocious tigers in Japan, so I must copy from a Chinese book."