Spring Farming Scene

Spring Farming Scene is a fan painting by Katsushika Isai in ink and color on silk, remounted as a hanging scroll and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2001.561.2). It depicts the labor of early spring in the Japanese agricultural calendar — the preparation of paddies, the planting of seedlings, the seasonal labor of farmers and oxen — and belongs to a subgenre of kōsaku-zu (farming pictures) that descended from Chinese imperial models of "plowing and weaving" imagery and was elaborated through Edo-period painting into a flexible vehicle for both didactic content (the cycle of agricultural labor through the year) and naturalistic landscape painting. Isai's composition follows the long horizontal sweep of the fan format, with figures and trees compressed against a curved horizon, and demonstrates the Hokusai-school capacity for genre painting at small scale. The work is dated by the museum to the Edo period (1615-1868) and entered the Metropolitan's collection in 2001 alongside a companion Summer Flowers fan (2001.561.1), the two together representing Isai's painting practice as a counterweight to the better-known drawing manuals on which his reputation has chiefly rested.