Birds and Flowers
Not on view
By the tenth century, bird-and-flower painting was an established genre in East Asian painting. In Korea folding screens on this subject became prevalent in the 18th century and continued to be popular into the twentieth century. This pair of screens would have originally been one folding screen with eight panels. Each panel features a pair of birds within a shallow landscape setting with plants and flowers. The birds range from ducks, peacocks, and chickens to mythological phoenixes. Many of the male-female pairings and their accompanying flowers or fruit allude to romance and fecundity, but the cranes, pine tree, lingzhi mushrooms, bamboo, and lotus flowers are also auspicious symbols of longevity and virtue. It is possible that the eight panels can also be read as progressing through the four seasons with cranes heralding a new year sunrise over a pine tree and ending with phoenixes amid autumnal foliage.
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