Attributed to Odawara Kano School
The Four Seasons: Autumn and Winter
Japan, Muromachi period, mid-to late 16th century
One of a pair of six-panel folding screens, ink and light color on paper.

Viewers are invited to enter this vast landscape from the lower right. Here, they may pause with the group of gentlemen conversing by the water's edge or follow the travelers up the hill towards the terrace where further company gazes from the terrace at the distant autumn moon. To the left, jagged mountains and bare trees convey the chill of winter. A mounted traveler wearing a broad thick hat against the falling snow wends his way towards the warmth of his host's shuttered pavilion.

By the 16th century when this work was painted, the landscape genre had developed a rich language of conventions in both painting style and motifs. In this screen, the artist employs a vocabulary of mountains and mist rendered primarily in ink and developed in 12th and 13th century Sung dynasty China. In 15th and 16th century Japan, it was adapted to large-scale decorative screens by the Kano family working in Kyoto. Here, the somewhat rigid brushwork and a proliferation of thematic detail point to the followers of Kano Motanobu working in Odawara, outside Kyoto near Kamakura, the capital city to the feudal lords of Eastern Japan.