Pheasants among Trees, Flowers of the Four Seasons
| Support Type: | Silk |
| Paint Type: | Mixed Media |
| Current Location: | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA |
| Location History: | The work is currently housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, as part of the Mary Griggs Burke Collection. It entered the Met in 2015 as a gift from the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation and is recorded under accession number 2015.300.68a–b. The Met currently lists the work as not on view. |
This diptych by Kano Shōei, painted probably in the 1560s, distills an entire year into a single facing pair of hanging scrolls. On the right, a pair of pheasants stand within a narrow, stage-like clearing bordered by spring dandelions and violets, with summer's crimson azaleas blooming near a stream at their feet. On the left, golden pheasants perch on a craggy rock beneath a loquat tree whose withering leaves signal autumn, while red-berried spearflowers nearby carry the mood into winter. The two panels are visually stitched together by an evergreen and a loquat branch that reach toward each other across the gap between the scrolls, framing the birds as if on a shallow stage. The choice of pheasant is not incidental the bird's long association with the sun goddess Amaterasu, mythic ancestress of Japan's imperial line, points to an aristocratic Kyoto patron, and the fine gold striations picking out the plumage reinforce that courtly register. Shōei, working within the Kano school established by his father Motonobu, follows inherited formulas of contour line, ink-wash modeling, and wet dotting on rock forms, yet the painting's tight, close-up framing already gestures toward the expansive screen compositions the Kano workshop would produce in the following Momoyama generation.