This screen, one from a pair featuring a composition of flowers in a seasonal progression from spring to winter, celebrates eternity with its auspicious motif of cranes. The brilliant colors, strong outlines in black ink, and profusion of pictorial elements are typical of the decorative formula established by Kano Motonobu (1476–1559), founder of the Kano school. The boldness, however, is more reminiscent of the prolific Kano-school painter Eitoku (1543–1590), and the treatment of branches is far closer to Eitoku’s style than to that of Motonobu’s other successors. The exaggerated dimensions of the trees, the attempt to create space for the projecting branches in the crowded composition, and the depiction of brushwood hedges in high relief suggest a late sixteenth-century date.
