Winter Farming Scene; (verso) Autumn Farming Scene

Winter Farming Scene; (verso) Autumn Farming Scene is a double-sided folding fan by Katsushika Isai in ink and color on paper with ivory mounting, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2000.210). The work pairs winter and autumn agricultural imagery on the two faces of a single fan, continuing the cycle of four-season farming pictures (shiki kōsaku-zu) that descended from Chinese imperial "plowing and weaving" imagery and was widely adapted in Edo-period painting. Autumn is shown with the harvest of rice and other grains, the storing of crops, and the seasonal labor of late autumn, while the winter side foregrounds the dormant fields, the gathering of firewood, and the small interior scenes that characterize the Japanese agricultural year's quiet months. The double-sided format gave Isai scope to deploy his Hokusai-school capacity for compressed multi-figure composition in two related but distinct registers, and the use of an ivory mounting suggests the fan was made as a luxury object intended for use as well as display. The Met acquired the work in 2000, and it is one of the most ambitious of Isai's surviving paintings in a Western collection.