The Four Accomplishments [right of a pair]

Shibata Zeshin, second half 19th century

Download4000 × 1824 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Shibata Zeshin (Japanese, 1807–1891)
Medium: Six-panel folding screen, one of a pair, ink, color, and gold leaf on paper
Size: 60 × 140 5/8 in. (152.4 × 357.19 cm) (image)
Museum: Minneapolis Institute of Art
Rights: Public Domain Mark

This pair of screens shows fashionable youths in the pleasure quarters enjoying the so-called Four Elegant Accomplishments: music, the board game go, calligraphy, and painting. Music is represented by the women and blind elderly man in the left screen. A go board appears in the far right panel. Nearby, books, scrolls, and writing implements—collectively representing calligraphy—have been laid out for figures who surround a low black-lacquer desk. Some of them turn to admire a pair of folding-screen paintings depicting Chinese landscapes.

Shibata Zeshin took inspiration from a famous folding screen commonly known as the Hikone Screen, a masterpiece of Japanese genre painting created in the 1620s or 1630s and well known in the 1800s. Zeshin was so moved after encountering the famous painting in Edo (now Tokyo) in the 1830s that he created at least six paintings modeled after it, including the present screens.

Text: Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), CC BY 4.0.