Minneapolis Institute of Art

The Four Accomplishments [left of a pair]

Shibata Zeshin

Date

second half 19th century

Medium

Six-panel folding screen, one of a pair, ink, color, and gold leaf on paper

Department

Asian Art

Institution

Minneapolis Institute of Art

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. Asia

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