Landscape of the Four Seasons (c. 1560): Artwork and History

Landscape of the Four Seasons (c. 1560) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Sesson Shukei Japanese, 1504-about 1589.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

Sesson Shukei was a Zen Buddhist monk and painter who achieved his idiosyncratic painterly style during an itinerant career in eastern Japan, seemingly without ever traveling to Kyoto, Japan’s cultural and political capital at the time. Sesson’s dream-like Chinese landscape expands before our eyes in understandable spatial depth, an effect that is enhanced by the folds of the screen. Reading the composition in the same manner as the Japanese language, from right to left, the seasons flow from the first red plum blossoms of the year, depicted on the right side of the right screen (top), all the way across to the snow-covered mountains on the far left side of the left screen (bottom). A mountain temple on the right and a village on the left enclose an inlet upon which boats come and go. People bustle about in activity, geologically impossible rock formations twist and turn, and water splashes out from the bottom of a waterfall like reaching fingers. For adherents of Zen Buddhism, a sect with origins in China, idealized landscapes described a world akin to paradise, in which intellectual and religious activities could be pursued unhindered and the cycle of the seasons symbolized the harmony and rebirth inherent in the natural world.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape of the Four Seasons
• Date: c. 1560
• Artist attribution: Sesson Shukei Japanese, 1504-about 1589
• Place of origin: Japan
• Medium: Pair of six-fold screens; ink and light color on paper
• Dimensions: 156.5 × 337 cm (61 5/8 × 132 11/16 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Arts of Asia
• Reference number: 1958.167

Collection credit

Gift of the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation

View the original

Explore the artwork in the Art Institute's collection, including its image and the museum's current catalogue details.

The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.