Flowers of the Four Seasons (one of a pair with F1997.31.1a-b)

Makoku, a Buddhist monk, was the least known member of a triumvirate of Nagoya-born painters; the other two were Yamamoto Baiitsu (1783-1856) and Nakabayashi Chikuto (1776-1853), who in the early nineteenth century advanced a painting style that melded Chinese Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasty styles with Japanese sensibilities. Both Baiitsu and Chikuto achieved considerable prominence in the highly competitive cultural milieu of Kyoto. Makoku, while fully engaged in a range of cultural activities, seems to have a more reserved, less commercially directed life than his colleagues.

Makoku proposes a naturalistic but highly unlikely arrangement of plants that represent the four seasons. A centuries-old painting practice for this kind of arrangement called for placement of representative flowers sequentially in clearly demarcated compositional space. Makoku follows an Edo-period (1615-1868) trend of blending flowers and grasses in a naturalistic rather than schematic mode and, further, uses the opportunity to depict less well-known flowers.

See also F1997.31.1a-b