Birds, flowers of the seasons, and civet cats

Japanese landscape screens often represent a sequence of four seasons from right to left, beginning with spring and ending with winter. This Japanese convention for representing a temporal sequence of seasons in an apparently unified spatial setting became established in large-format Japanese paintings by the late fifteenth century. While Japanese painters often incorporated birds and flowers-subjects adapted from Chinese art collected in Japan from the thirteenth century onward-into seasonal landscape painting, this pair of screens is somewhat unusual in its inclusion of exotic musk (civet) cats, known in Japanese as jakoneko.