Quail and Autumn Flowers

A hanging-scroll painting by Tosa Mitsuoki depicting a quail among autumn grasses and flowering plants, executed in ink and colour on silk. The quail-and-autumn-flowers subject was one of the most consistently produced kacho-ga (bird-and-flower) compositions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese painting, drawing on the seasonal poetic association of the bird with the autumn months and on the long Chinese painting tradition of depicting quail among reeds and millet that Japanese painters had naturalised within yamato-e. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves this work (accession 36.100.52) as part of its collection of seventeenth-century Tosa-school painting. The composition deploys Mitsuoki's refined approach to the bird-and-flower format: the quail rendered with precise observation of feather pattern and stance, set among autumn grasses (akikusa) including pampas grass (susuki), bush clover (hagi), and other plants of the classical autumn-flower repertoire that Japanese poetry had codified as the visual signature of the season. The hanging-scroll format - rather than the screen or handscroll formats Mitsuoki used for his most elaborate court commissions - made the work suitable for display in a tokonoma alcove during the appropriate autumn season, with the painting rotated through the year in the traditional Japanese system of seasonal display.