From its inception, Japanese secular painting was intimately linked to poetry. Poets composed verses about images in paintings; painters made works based on poems and inscribed them with erudite calligraphy, or pasted a poem in elegant characters onto the painting. The resulting synthesis exceeded the sum of the parts, creating many layers of meaning.

Favorite themes were the four seasons and the symbols and rituals associated with each. Even when they depicted celebrated scenery or places made famous by literature, artists chose flowers, leaves, birds, or human activities to indicate the specific season. These screens are based on Fujiwara Teika’s early 13th-century Poems of Birds and Flowers of the Twelve Months. As an example of word and image working together, plum blossoms and Mandarin ducks signify the twelfth lunar month, roughly corresponding to February. Plum blossoms are especially treasured because they bloom in the coldest time of the year, their bright colors and spicy fragrance promising the arrival of spring. Meanwhile, a poetic play on the name of the Mandarin duck, oshi, gives “bird of regret,” a connotation carried out with the imagery of snow falling layer upon layer, year after year. Tosa Mitsunari, who was director of the Imperial Painters’ Bureau from 1681 to 1696, exhibits here his meticulous brushwork, sensitive application of colors, and flowing composition.

Before my eyes
the snowflakes fall upon the icy pond
piling up like the years gone by
like the layered feather coats of the oshi.
—Fujiwara Teika, 1214, inscription on the painting