Based in Kyoto, the Hara School served from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries as official artists to the Imperial Court.

[2] 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.

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,[10] and treatments of space.

[11] 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.

It retains the monochrome style with its refined Chinese associations,[12] but adds sparing use of colour in the slight pink of the cherry blossoms, symbolic of spring,[13] of transience and of Japan itself.