Landscape of the Four Seasons (late 1400s): Art, History and Details

Landscape of the Four Seasons (late 1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Yi Sumun (Korean, b. c. 1404).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Yi Sumun is believed to have been a Korean painter who migrated to Japan in 1424 at the age of 20. This pair of screens is the artist’s most important composition in this format. Viewed from right to left, the screens show the passage of the four seasons, a popular theme in medieval Japanese ink painting.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape of the Four Seasons
• Date: late 1400s
• Creator attribution: Yi Sumun (Korean, b. c. 1404)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-panel screens; ink and slight color on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 108 x 361.3 cm (42 1/2 x 142 1/4 in.); Painting only: 92.7 x 348.7 cm (36 1/2 x 137 5/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Korean Art
• Accession number: 1976.92.2

A detail from the museum

Yi Sumun is believed to have been a Korean man who moved to Japan at the age of 20 and became an influential landscape painter in Japan.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. Japanese Screens from the Museum and Cleveland Collections. Cleveland: The Museum, 1977.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Lee, Sherman E., Michael R. Cunningham, and Ursula Korneitchouk. One Thousand Years of Japanese Art (650-1650): From the Cleveland Museum of Art : Catalogue. [New York]: Japan Society, 1981.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.