19th Century Japanese Screen Byobu Folding Rooster 6-Panel Spring Summer Hold Raku Kano, Framed

Details

Description

six-panel folding screen. wood block printed, gold and multicolor
Birds and flowers of spring-summer seasons

gold background
Colours and gold … Read more six-panel folding screen. wood block printed, gold and multicolor
Birds and flowers of spring-summer seasons

gold background
Colours and gold on paper
Brocade border
Wood frame with brass metal hardware

This screen depicts the changing of the seasons from spring to summer, read from right to left (as columns were read in the traditional Japanese writing system).
Cherry blossom (sakura) is prominent in the top right, echoing the importance of cherry blossom as sign of transient beauty and turning point in the seasons (cherry blossom trees flower magnificently for a short time in the month of March), celebrated in hanami festivals in Japan. Various identifiable flora include bamboo, bamboo shoots, bullrushes, cedar trees, dandelion, cherry blossom, Japanese lily, kerria rose, lantern flowers, lichen, and peonies.

The most prominent birds are a pair of roosters. On the right screen are two cranes on the ground and one flying in. based on their plumage, which are either hooded cranes, whitenapped cranes or the artist’s composite of the two. Both species breed in Siberia and Mongolia but migrate to Japan for spring and summer.

There are songbirds on the tree branches and ducks in the pond.
Screens depicting the changing seasons through flora and fauna were an established genre in Japanese art by this point, as seen in Tosa Mitsunobu’s Bamboo in the Four Seasons, late 1400s - early 1500s, from the Muromachi period (1392-1573), (currently in the Metropolitan Museum). Themes of nature’s endurance and transience were common, influenced by prevailing religious sentiments which encouraged the contemplation of natural phenomena (Shintoism and Zen Buddhism). The human figure did not occupy a central place in Japanese representational art, except as a foil for natural phenomena; instead, non-human phenomena were invested with human meaning.

The flat picture plane is almost evenly divided between areas of coloured flora and fauna and the ‘negative’ gilt space representing clouds and ground. Compositional balance is also achieved by the way positive forms like the branches of the cedar tree and the blue water of the pond give a horizontal counterpoint to the vertical panels of screen. The plants also extend across the panel edges, weaving the picture together and leading the idea horizontally from one group to the other, following the implied passage of time.
Almost every one of these dark, ‘positive’ forms is connected to the next one, if only by a single blade of grass, emphasising the narrative continuum. While there is some overlapping of forms, there is no clear diminution of scale or linear perspective to give pictorial depth; the picture instead loosely conforms to Japanese conventions of ‘vertical perspective’ in which relative distances between objects are suggested by their relative heights up the flat plane, necessitating the ‘blank’ areas of cloud or ground to cover or stand for intervening spaces. In turn, rather than encompassing a unified three-dimensional space frozen in a single moment as in Western perspectival painting, the viewer’s eye travels along with the screen a section at a time, as when reading a scroll.

Linear form prevails, emphasised by the relative lack of tonal modelling and the ‘silhouette’ aesthetic created by the gilt areas of negative space. The extreme delicacy of line is shown in the painting of individual blades of grass and pine needles. The artist also showcases his versatile command of line by juxtaposing the diverse forms of iris leaves, peonies and cedar. While the complex, naturalistic forms show intense observation (see how the peonies are depicted from different angles, for instance), the artist has nonetheless exaggerated the curvilinear forms of the tree boughs, trunks and roots and echoed them in the mossy ground below. This muscular exaggeration is inspired by and typical of Eitoku’s manner and the ‘monumental’ style of his Kanō school in the Azuchi Monoyama period.

The dominant colours are gold, green, blue, white and red, each of these repeated in ways that lead the eye across the whole composition. Green and gold provide the composition’s structure; white connects the herons and peonies across the panels; red connects camellias with the lilies, peonies, lantern flowers, and red dashes in the roosters' plumage. This use of colour gives a sense of rhythm to the looking experience which further promotes the temporal unfolding of the subject. The primary tonal contrast is not between depicted light and shadow but between positive forms and negative space, highlighting the precise outlines of species. The use of gold conveyed opulence within daimyō castles. It also would have reflected real sunlight or lamplight and helped light interiors, suggesting connections between the real natural world outside the castle and that depicted in the screen. See less