Birds and Flowers in a Landscape of the Four Seasons

About this work

The monk-painter Sesshū is revered today, as he was in his own time. While he left Kyoto's sophisticated intellectual and cultural environment to live in a provincial village in a far western province, he seems never to have severed contacts with the monastic communities of his young adulthood. His residence in Yamaguchi proved fortuitous because his patron, the region's military lord, enjoyed considerable freedom in conducting trade missions overseas with Korea and China. Sesshū went to China in 1467 and traveled about the country, visiting well-known historical sites and Chan (Zen) temples before returning two years later. Thus he became familiar with contemporary painting practices, materials, formats, and subject matter. His assimilation and then transmission of these elements had a profound impact on the following generations of ink painters, patrons, and Zen communities throughout Japan.

Despite the presence on these byōbu of the name "Sesshū," they are from the hand of another accomplished but as yet anonymous follower active in the middle of the sixteenth century. Sesshū's name here, as on a handful of similar bird-and-flower byōbu, attests to the master's identification…