The Four Seasons

This collection of woodblock prints celebrates the seasons and is designed as a Japanese-style accordion-fold book with open binding and slipcased with a booklet for the text.

Embracing seasonal change is an important part of Japan’s native belief system and an enduring theme of its creative expression. Japanese artists—including Hokusai, Hiroshige, Harunobu, and many others—have long celebrated the endless cycle and rhythm of nature and the fleeting transience and beauty of the seasons, depicting common customs from picnics welcoming spring under blossoming cherry trees to ritual offerings made to the autumnal harvest moon.

The seasonal iconography includes recurring plant and wildlife elements: plum blossoms, irises, morning glories, cranes, geese flying in migratory formation. Some pictorial compositions focus upon a single time of year, but many encompass all four seasons together.

This beautiful and elegant collection makes the ideal gift for anyone interested in the art and culture of Japan. The classic woodblocks in this collection express essential truths about the natural world and the evanescence of human experience in a visual idiom that, while distinctively Japanese, has great universal appeal.Amélie Balcou is an art historian with a degree from the Sorbonne, Paris. She has written extensively on Asian art and is the author of several books in French about Japanese woodblock prints.