
1918
花木宿幽鳥 石潭遊美魚 出門行樂久 入室復繙書 Amid flowering trees are perched hidden birds; In stony tarn are swimming lovely fish. I sally forth, enjoying myself for hours, Return back home, again flip through my books. The titles of the four landscapes are written by Kodōjin on the individual storage boxes: Landscape with Spring Scenery (Shunkei sansui), Landscape after Mi Fu (Bei Futsu sansui), Landscape with Autumn Scenery (Shūkei sansui), and Landscape with Snow Scenery (Sekkei sansui). Each work was meticulously executed. Color is applied for the blossoms in the spring landscape and for the foliage in the autumn landscape. In contrast, the summer landscape, which is in the style of the Chinese painter-calligrapher Mi Fu (Mi Fei, 1051–1107), one of the four greatest calligraphers of the Song dynasty (960–1279), and the winter landscape are both monochrome.