Birds, flowers of the seasons, and civet cats
16th century
Classification
Painting
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Gift of Charles Lang Freer
Accession Number
F1901.178-179
Tags
About this artwork
Japanese landscape screens often represent a sequence of four seasons from right to left, beginning with spring and ending with winter. This Japanese convention for representing a temporal sequence of seasons in an apparently unified spatial setting became established in large-format Japanese paintings by the late fifteenth century. While Japanese painters often incorporated birds and flowers-subjects adapted from Chinese art collected in Japan from the thirteenth century onward-into seasonal la...
About the Artist
Unknown
The artist designated as "Unknown" in our virtual museum's collection exemplifies a poignant chapter in art history: creators whose identities have faded into obscurity despite the enduring power of their work. With only one known artwork attributed to them in our holdings, this figure represents countless anonymous hands that shaped visual culture across centuries. Museums worldwide, including th...