page_title: Spring and Autumn Landscapes
section_title: Genre
hierarchical_section_title: Spring and Autumn Landscapes / Genre
caption_attribution_description: English: Hara Zaisho's autumn image detail
context_page_description: Spring and autumn landscapes is a pair of paintings representing spring and autumn by Japanese artist Hara Zaishō. It is part of the permanent collection of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada.
context_section_description: These two paintings belong to the tsukinami-e genre: images depicting changing landscapes through the seasons. It was not uncommon for tsukinami-e to take the form of diptychs, with the entire year represented by images of spring and autumn. The pair is read from right to left, with spring preceding autumn.
  These landscapes are sumi-e—ink paintings—done on silk, a relatively expensive medium reflecting the status of the artist and patron. They are mounted as kakejiku or kakemono, vertical hanging scrolls. This type of painting would typically be hung in a tokonoma alcove, sometimes foregrounded by a seasonal flower arrangement and decorative incense burner. Kakemono were intended to be viewed while frontally seated at the distance of a tatami mat width (approximately 90 cm). Although kakejiku were objects of decoration, their lack of elaboration reflects their secondary purpose as objects to stimulate quiet contemplation.
   
  This pair of paintings belongs to a period in Japanese art during which depictions of landscape were undergoing reconsideration.  Faced with Japan’s emergence as a nation on the world stage, artists were moving away from classical Chinese conventions to develop a more nativized system of symbolic motifs, and treatments of space. The cherry blossoms in the spring image and the thatched roof in the autumn landscape tie Zaishō’s works to contemporary Japan rather than to ancient China.
caption: Autumn landscape
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