Birds and Chrysanthemums in Snow

A pair of small birds have alighted on the branch of an old tree at the water’s edge. A dusting of snow—delicately painted using gofun, a white pigment made of ground oyster shells—has fallen on the tree and a clump of blooming chrysanthemums below. This painting was almost certainly once part of a larger set depicting birds and flowers of various seasons. The season represented here is early winter, when chrysanthemums remain in bloom even as the snow begins to fall. The artist Geiai is a bit of a mystery, but his known body of work reveals fluency in several different styles of Chinese painting introduced to Japan in the 1300s and 1400s. The unique composition (with most motifs clustered at left), heavy contour lines, and distinctive texturing of rocks suggest that Geiai took as his model a painting by a member of the Zhe school, a group of painters that flourished in China’s Zhejiang region during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).