Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons

Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons (Shiki Kachō) is Araki Jippō's most celebrated work, a set of four hanging scrolls (kakejiku) executed in color pigments on silk in 1917 (Taishō 6) and now held by the Yamatane Museum of Art in Tokyo, the principal museum of Japanese-style painting in the city and the institution to which Jippō's most ambitious mature compositions have come to be associated. The four scrolls are read from right to left as spring, summer, autumn, and winter — the canonical East Asian sequence in which the kachō-e (bird-and-flower) painter's specialist vocabulary of seasonal birds and seasonal plants is deployed across an extended pictorial year. The spring panel shows the early flowering plants and small birds associated with the New Year and the start of the agricultural calendar; the summer panel deploys the lotus, the iris, and the kingfisher or water-loving birds of the rainy season; the autumn panel turns to the maple, the chrysanthemum, and the autumn grasses (akinanakusa), with the small migratory birds of the harvest; the winter panel rests on snow-laden pine, plum, and the larger water birds — cranes, ducks, or wild geese — that Edo-period bird-and-flower painters had codified as the winter vocabulary. Jippō's handling combines the close observational drawing of birds and plants that the Maruyama-Shijō tradition had bequeathed to late Meiji nihonga with the atmospheric perspective and subtle lighting that he had absorbed from his selective study of Western painting; the four scrolls together represent the formal, decoratively disciplined ideal of the Tokyo bird-and-flower establishment that Jippō, as the senior Araki painter and as a leading juror of the Bunten salon, embodied during the Taishō period. The set was acquired by the Yamatane Museum in the second half of the twentieth century and is published in the museum's nihonga catalogues as one of the touchstone works of early-twentieth-century kachō-e.