A gallery in words

This shrine does not reproduce the paintings themselves — most are still under copyright somewhere, and a jpeg would flatten the ink anyway. Instead: a describer’s gallery, the subjects he returned to again and again, for the years he made them famous. Visit the further reading page for museums that hold the real thing.

Recurring subjects, roughly by the decade they came to define him
Subject	Decade	What’s on the paper
Shrimp	1920s–50s	His single most famous motif. Translucent bodies built from a handful of grey-black strokes, legs added almost as an afterthought, yet the whole animal reads as weightless and underwater. He kept live shrimp on his desk for years to study how the segments caught the light.
Crabs	1920s–40s	Painted with the same economy as the shrimp but heavier, more argumentative — ink blots for the shell, spidery legs radiating outward, usually a small procession of two or three rather than one.
Chicks and roosters	1930s–40s	Fluffy, faintly comic hatchlings rendered in soft wash, often paired with a single scratchy ink line for a worm or a grain of rice — the whole drama of the painting compressed into that one line.
Vegetables and gourds	1930s–50s	Garlic bulbs, loofahs, radishes, ears of corn: kitchen produce elevated to the same seriousness as a scholar’s bamboo, painted in flat washes of colour rather than the monochrome ink favoured by more academic painters.
Insects	throughout his career	Grasshoppers, cicadas, dragonflies — painted with startling, almost scientific precision, often set against a loosely brushed flower or leaf so the contrast in detail does the work a caption would otherwise do.
Mice	1940s	A late, wry addition — small ink-black rodents, usually caught mid-theft around a candle or a stack of fruit, closer to a cartoonist’s line than a court painter’s.

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