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Lot Essay
PUBLISHED:
Christine Guth, Asobi: Play in the Arts of Japan (New York: Katonah Museum of Art, 1992), cover and pl. 8.
The spirit of play takes many forms in Japanese art. Seasonal games and contests, many with ritual overtones reaching back to antiquity are spread across this panoramic landscape. This is the right half of a pair of screens featuring games associated with the twelve months. Spring and summer are represented on this screen, while fall and winter activities would have appeared on the now missing left half. Costumes are lavish and richly detailed, in keeping with an early seventeenth-century date.
The idyllic setting is teeming with groups of every age indulging in outdoor sports and pleasurable pastimes. In the upper right corner of the first, or far right, panel men and women gather young herbs eaten during the first month of the new year to ward off disease and promote longevity. Below them, on the lower half of the first and second panels, boys are playing a game resembling field hockey using mallets attached to ropes, brooms, and round pucks called buri buri. This was also a new year's game since the sound of the puck being struck was thought to drive out evil spirits. Two women playing another new year's game, battledore and shuttlecock, stand to the right of a pine tree in the second panel. To their left, and stretching across several panels, a large group of men and boys is engaged in a tug of war. Above the tug of war young men are shooting game. Some boys have stripped and are enjoying a swimming hole fed by a mountain waterfall. At the far left merrymakers dance in a circle while their attendants wait on the sidelines to serve a fancy picnic lunch.
There is a progression of blossoming plants, beginning with a plum tree signifying early spring, continuing on to cherry trees and then culminating in iris on the banks of the river, peony bushes, and a paulownia tree, signaling the arrival of summer.
Christine Guth, Asobi: Play in the Arts of Japan (New York: Katonah Museum of Art, 1992), cover and pl. 8.
The spirit of play takes many forms in Japanese art. Seasonal games and contests, many with ritual overtones reaching back to antiquity are spread across this panoramic landscape. This is the right half of a pair of screens featuring games associated with the twelve months. Spring and summer are represented on this screen, while fall and winter activities would have appeared on the now missing left half. Costumes are lavish and richly detailed, in keeping with an early seventeenth-century date.
The idyllic setting is teeming with groups of every age indulging in outdoor sports and pleasurable pastimes. In the upper right corner of the first, or far right, panel men and women gather young herbs eaten during the first month of the new year to ward off disease and promote longevity. Below them, on the lower half of the first and second panels, boys are playing a game resembling field hockey using mallets attached to ropes, brooms, and round pucks called buri buri. This was also a new year's game since the sound of the puck being struck was thought to drive out evil spirits. Two women playing another new year's game, battledore and shuttlecock, stand to the right of a pine tree in the second panel. To their left, and stretching across several panels, a large group of men and boys is engaged in a tug of war. Above the tug of war young men are shooting game. Some boys have stripped and are enjoying a swimming hole fed by a mountain waterfall. At the far left merrymakers dance in a circle while their attendants wait on the sidelines to serve a fancy picnic lunch.
There is a progression of blossoming plants, beginning with a plum tree signifying early spring, continuing on to cherry trees and then culminating in iris on the banks of the river, peony bushes, and a paulownia tree, signaling the arrival of summer.