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Year of Abundance
Ike no Taiga Japanese
Not on view
The central painting of this triptych depicts a scene of rice threshing after an abundant harvest, contentedly observed by a peasant family standing at the edge of a small farming village shaded by a gigantic tree. In the right-hand landscape, fishermen exchange cups of sake in a boat anchored along the shore of a river. On the left, two scholars enjoy cups of steeped tea (sencha) in a pavilion facing a mountain stream where a boy, who has accompanied them, is gathering more water for boiling.
Inscribed by the artist at the top of the central painting is a poem from the Shijing (Japanese: Shikyō or Classic of Poetry; composed ca. 600 B.C.), China’s oldest poetry anthology.
Rich is the year with much millet and rice,
and we have tall granaries [filled]
with hundreds and thousands and millions of sheaves.
We make wine and sweet spirits
to offer to ancestors and ancestresses
thus to fulfill the hundred rites
and to bring down blessings in abundance.
—Trans. Burton Watson
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