Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Four Imperial Concubines
Not on view
The scroll depicts four ladies and sixteen boys playing in a garden among finely detailed buildings. The toys—a kite, a pole with a carp, firecrackers, a chime, and a toy horse—all carry auspicious symbolic meanings. This scene takes place on New Year’s Eve and is connected compositionally to New Year’s Morning, displayed at left. Together, they record in a unified space the temporal transition from one year to the next. The Japanese blue-paper mount indicates that the print was once part of a Japanese collection.
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