Summer and winter landscapes Pair of six-panel folding screens

The brushwork, seals, and calligraphy on this pair of seventeenth-century screens record a web of affiliations between individuals spanning different generations and origins. The seals indicate that the summer and winter landscapes were painted by Toeki, the son of Unkoku Togan (1547–1618) and his successor as head of the Unkoku school. The school used a conservative style—in evidence here—based on works by the fifteenth-century Zen monk Sesshu Toyo (1420–1506), a master painter who had lived in the same region in western Japan where the Unkoku school was based.

Above the landscapes are inscriptions by the Obaku Zen monk Dokuryu (1596–1672), who fled China for Japan during the chaos around the fall of the Ming dynasty. As Dokuryu arrived in Japan in 1653, nine years after Toeki’s death, his inscriptions presumably postdate the painting. The contents of the inscriptions, which have not yet been transcribed, may hold the key to understanding the circumstances under which he wrote on the screens.