Landscapes of the Four Seasons

Landscapes of the Four Seasons is a set of four hanging scrolls by Yamamoto Baiitsu in ink and color on silk, dated 1848 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2015.300.190a-d). The set follows the standard nanga (literati painting) format of treating the Chinese-derived cycle of the seasons across four matched scrolls: Spring with budding trees and a hermit's pavilion among low hills; Summer with full foliage along a river and a fishing boat at the base of cliffs; Autumn with reddened maples and travellers among mountain villages; Winter with snow-laden pines, a frozen waterfall, and a scholar crossing a bridge. Painted when Baiitsu was sixty-five, in the last decade of his life, the scrolls condense decades of his study of Yuan and Ming Chinese landscape models — absorbed in his youth from the Kamiya Tenyū collection in Nagoya and elaborated through his decades in the Kyoto literati circles of Tanomura Chikuden and Rai San'yō — into a personal manner that the Met's curators have characterized as transcending conventional literati imagery to produce an individual, moody statement of the artist in nature. The four scrolls were given to the museum in 2015 as part of the Mary Griggs Burke Collection, one of the most important American holdings of Japanese painting, and they stand among Baiitsu's most ambitious surviving landscape works.