Spring and Autumn Landscapes

Spring and autumn landscapes is a pair of paintings representing spring and autumn by Japanese artist Hara Zaishō (1813–1872). It is part of the permanent collection of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada.
Hara Zaishō.
Hara Zaishō (原在照) was the adopted son of Hara Zaimei (原在明), whom he succeeded as the third head of the Hara School of professional painters. Based in Kyoto, the Hara School served from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries as official artists to the Imperial Court. Hara Zaishō contributed several pieces to the Kyoto Imperial Palace during its reconstruction following a fire in 1854. The most famous of these is a cherry tree motif painted on sliding "fusuma" doors in the "Sakura-no-ma" (Cherry Blossom Room).
Zaishō’s career spanned the late Edo (1603-1867) and early Meiji (1868-1912) periods, a time of great change within Japan as a result of its 1854 opening to the West. The Hara School was aligned with the Maruyama School of painters, a movement founded in the late 18th century associated with western-influenced tendencies such as objective realism, unified perspective, shading and contouring.
Hara Zaishō is also used the art names Kanran (観瀾) and Yūran (夕鸞).
Genre.
These two paintings belong to the "tsukinami-e" genre: images depicting changing landscapes through the seasons. It was not uncommon for "tsukinami-e" to take the form of diptychs, with the entire year represented by images of spring and autumn. The pair is read from right to left, with spring preceding autumn.
These landscapes are "sumi-e"—ink paintings—done on silk, a relatively expensive medium reflecting the status of the artist and patron. They are mounted as "kakejiku" or "kakemono", vertical hanging scrolls. This type of painting would typically be hung in a "tokonoma" alcove, sometimes foregrounded by a seasonal flower arrangement and decorative incense burner. "Kakemono" were intended to be viewed while frontally seated at the distance of a "tatami" mat width (approximately 90 cm). Although "kakejiku" were objects of decoration, their lack of elaboration reflects their secondary purpose as objects to stimulate quiet contemplation.
This pair of paintings belongs to a period in Japanese art during which depictions of landscape were undergoing reconsideration. Faced with Japan’s emergence as a nation on the world stage, artists were moving away from classical Chinese conventions to develop a more nativized system of symbolic motifs, and treatments of space. The cherry blossoms in the spring image and the thatched roof in the autumn landscape tie Zaishō’s works to contemporary Japan rather than to ancient China.
Style and content.
"Spring Landscape" features a full moon shining above a solitary cherry tree in full bloom planted on the slope of a mountain. It retains the monochrome style with its refined Chinese associations, but adds sparing use of colour in the slight pink of the cherry blossoms, symbolic of spring, of transience and of Japan itself.
In "Autumn Landscape", Zaishō again depicts a mountain scene, an environment classically associated with the sacred. Here, the slopes are flanked by pine trees, often invoked as symbols of longevity and steadfastness in counterpoint to the fleetingness of spring’s cherry blossoms.