Landscape of the Four Seasons

Sesson Shukei · c. 1560

Medium

Pair of six-fold screens; ink and light color on paper

Original size

156.5 × 337 cm (61 5/8 × 132 11/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Sesson Shukei's pair of six-fold screens unfolds as a sweeping, season-by-season journey through a mountainous landscape — intimate in detail yet monumental in scope. Shukei was a self-taught Zen monk-painter who spent much of his life in Japan's remote eastern provinces, far from the cultural centers where his contemporaries worked. He absorbed the tradition of the great Sesshū Tōyō without ever studying under him directly, developing an ink style that is more angular and restless than his predecessors — rocks feel hewn, trees seem to twist against the wind, and open mist creates a charged stillness. Working in ink with only restrained passages of color, he coaxed extraordinary tonal range from a near-monochrome palette. It is well-documented that Shukei lived and worked into his eighties or nineties, an exceptional lifespan for the period, and scholars note that his late works show no decline in vitality — if anything, the brushwork grew bolder. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates Shukei's ink rhythms into the richer tonal warmth of oil on canvas, preserving the expressive weight of each brushstroke while bringing the work's quiet drama into a format that holds its own on any wall.