Persimmon Tree

Persimmon Tree, a two-panel folding screen in ink and color on paper dated to 1816, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 57.156.3). The screen belongs to a small but important group of Sakai Hōitsu's mid-career compositions in which a single seasonal tree — persimmon, plum, or pine — is set against a plain ground and treated as the entire subject of a substantial decorative work. The persimmon, with its glossy orange fruit ripening into late autumn, is a quintessentially Japanese seasonal motif long honored in both painting and poetry; Hōitsu renders the tree's gnarled trunk with the tarashikomi ink-pooling technique that defines the Rinpa school's brushwork, and picks out the fruit in saturated mineral pigment against the warmer paper ground. Painted in 1816 — the year after Hōitsu organized the centenary memorial exhibition for Ogata Kōrin and published the first Kōrin hyakuzu album — the screen shows the painter at the height of his powers and explicitly in dialogue with Kōrin's century-earlier idiom, distilling a complete seasonal subject into the minimal expressive vocabulary of trunk, branch, and fruit that became one of the most influential conventions of late Edo decorative painting.