Autumn Grasses

This is a pair of folding screens. It features gentle, overlapping, gold slopes tinged with translucent, light-green hues. Plants like pampas grass, chrysanthemums, bush clovers, sunset hibiscuses, Confederate roses and yellow patrinias bloom thickly across the slopes. The types of plants suggest the screens are depicting summer through to autumn. The painter has predominantly used white, green and yellow tones to lend a refreshing sense of uniformity to the depictions of various flora. The chrysanthemums on the left and right edges are rendered using thick layers of gofun, a white pigment made from mollusc shells. They are more-or-less the same size, so the picture still matches up even when the screen order is reversed. We hope you enjoy the feeling of walking through an endless field of flowers and plants beneath a clear autumn sky.

— Museum description: Tokyo National Museum (CC BY 4.0), via ColBase / Japan Search.