Autumn Maples with Poem Slips

One of a pair of six-panel folding screens by Tosa Mitsuoki, depicting an autumn maple tree against a ground of gold leaf, the branches densely hung with paper poem slips (tanzaku) on which classical waka have been inscribed. The composition belongs to the period after 1654, when Mitsuoki was appointed edokoro azukari (head of the imperial Office of Painting), restoring the Tosa school to its historic position as the painters of the Kyoto imperial court. The motif of poem slips suspended from blossoming branches drew on the courtly practice of hanging waka compositions from trees during seasonal poetry gatherings, an activity recorded in Heian-period literary sources and codified into a recognised yamato-e subject. The composition pairs with a companion screen of flowering cherry, the two together standing for the canonical poetic seasons of spring and autumn around which the classical Japanese literary calendar was organised. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the screen to circa 1675 and preserves it within its substantial Japanese painting collection. The use of ink, mineral colours, gold leaf, and gold powder on silk is entirely characteristic of mature Tosa-school screen painting under Mitsuoki's leadership: the gold ground provides both atmospheric depth and the literal display surface for the calligraphic poem slips, while the dense decorative arrangement of branches and leaves achieves a balance of natural observation and pictorial pattern-making that defines the Tosa-school revival of the seventeenth century.