Flowers and Trees of the Four Seasons (left screen)
The painter Watanabe Shikō had a special interest in scientific realism, based on interactions with his patron Konoe Iehiro. Shikō combined his attention to accurate depiction of plants with strong ink outlines and decorative elements like gold and silver, arriving at an innovative style that influenced many of his peers in the city of Kyoto.
Colors in this work
Details
- Date
- early to mid-1700s
- Dimensions
- overall: height 1.55 m, width 3.685 m
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Holding institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Palette
-
Select a color to find related artworks.
- Image provider
- cleveland-museum-of-art
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Credit
- Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
Art Genome Taxonomy
12 tags
Subject Matter
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Flora Both · 99%
The title identifies flowers and trees of the four seasons, and the image visibly presents numerous flowering plants, grasses, leaves, and branches.
Visual Qualities
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Curvilinear Forms Visual · 92%
Sweeping branches, arcing grasses, and bending stems create an emphatic network of curved contours across the screen.
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Sparse Visual · 85%
Large areas of largely open metallic ground separate several concentrated botanical groupings, producing a spacious overall composition.
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Highly Ornamented Visual · 88%
The composition has an ornate decorative effect through its gilded ground, metallic bands, varied blossoms, patterned foliage, and decorated frame.
Medium and Techniques
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Painting Both · 99%
The catalog classifies the object as a painting, and the image visibly shows a painted composition on a folding screen.
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Screen Format Both · 99%
The metadata identifies a six-panel folding screen, and the image clearly shows six vertically articulated panels joined in a folding format.
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Work on Paper Metadata · 99%
The catalog specifies ink, color, gold, silver, and gilding on paper.
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Gold Leaf and Gilding Metadata · 97%
Gilding is explicitly included in the catalog medium, and the gold ground is visibly used as a major decorative surface.
Time Periods
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18th Century Art Metadata · 98%
The catalog dates the work to 1700–1725, described as the early to mid-1700s.
Geographic Regions
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Japanese Art Metadata · 99%
The Cleveland Museum of Art identifies the work as Japanese Art, made in Japan during the Edo period.
Materials
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Gold Both · 99%
The catalog specifies gold and gilding, while the image visibly shows a broad luminous gold ground and additional gold metallic passages.
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Silver Metadata · 98%
Silver is explicitly listed in the catalog medium; the image also contains pale, shimmering metallic passages, though their exact material cannot be established from the image alone.
Source & rights
Watanabe Shikō (Japanese, 1683–1755). Flowers and Trees of the Four Seasons (left screen). Cleveland Museum of Art.
High-resolution sources
- Original TIFF ↗ 29,937 × 14,031 · Cleveland Museum Of Art · Available