Landscape of the Four Seasons, Ink and Light Color on Paper

A Copy That Outgrew Its Footnote

For more than sixty years, this handscroll sat in the records as an appendix. It was listed beneath one of Sesshū's most famous paintings, catalogued as a supporting item meant only to enrich the National Treasure it imitated. Then, on 27 June 2023, Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs designated it an Important Cultural Property in its own right and corrected its attribution at the same time.

The work is a landscape of the four seasons, painted in ink with restrained washes of color on paper. It runs about 16.2 meters long and stands a little under 40 centimeters high, the dimensions of the original it follows almost line for line. The painter was Unkoku Tōeki (1591–1644), and the scroll dates from the first decades of the Edo period. It belongs to the Mōri Hōkōkai foundation and is kept at the Mōri Museum in Hōfu, Yamaguchi.

Its full title spells out the puzzle it took scholars decades to solve: Landscapes of the Four Seasons, by Unkoku Tōeki, a duplicate of a work by Sesshū.

The Scroll Behind the Scroll

To understand why a copy matters this much, start with what it copies. Sesshū Tōyō (1420–1506) was a Zen monk who became the most influential ink painter of medieval Japan. He trained at Shōkoku-ji in Kyoto, sailed to Ming China to study Chinese landscape masters, and spent his later years working in the western provinces of Suō and Nagato, present-day Yamaguchi. In 1486, at sixty-seven, he completed the long handscroll known today as the Sansui Chōkan, or "Long Landscape Scroll." Four seasons open in sequence along its length, beginning in spring and closing in winter. It is a National Treasure, and it has remained in the Mōri family collection in Hōfu for generations.

A century after Sesshū, the warlord Mōri Terumoto handed a painter named Hara Naoharu both Sesshū's old studio, the Unkoku-an, and the Sansui Chōkan itself, with instructions to carry on the master's line. Naoharu took the name Unkoku Tōgan (1547–1618) and built a school around that inheritance. Possession of Sesshū's studio and his greatest scroll became the school's claim to legitimacy. The Sansui Chōkan was treated less as a museum piece than as a closely guarded teaching model, the source from which the Unkoku style was meant to flow.

Tōeki was Tōgan's son and the school's second head. He styled himself a fourth-generation heir of Sesshū. He had a steadier, brighter, more geometric hand than his father, and by most accounts surpassed him in technical control. This scroll is his work.

How a Family Used One Painting Twice

The reattribution rests on a piece of writing attached to the scroll. After Tōeki died, in 1646 a monk named Tenyū Shōkō added a colophon at the request of Tōeki's second son, Tōji. Read together with the painting's style and with records of a copy in Tōeki's hand, that text rewrote the object's history.

What it reveals is a quiet act of family strategy. The original Sansui Chōkan passed to Tōeki's eldest son, Tōyo, who inherited the main line and went on to call himself Sesshū's fifth-generation heir. The copy went to the second son, Tōji. In other words, Tōeki had a full-scale duplicate of the school's secret model made so that a second branch of the family could hold an equivalent treasure. The colophon Tōji commissioned reinforced that arrangement, lending the duplicate its own pedigree. The two sons were even raised to the clerical rank of Hokkyō at the same time, an unusual pairing that fits the picture.

This is why a copy earned independent recognition. Few objects show so concretely how an early-modern painting school transmitted its founding model and propped up a junior house in the process. The scroll is a rare surviving record of how lineage, ownership, and instruction worked inside a Japanese workshop, and a useful window onto how later generations received and reused Sesshū. Until 2023 it had been credited to Tōgan; closer study moved it to Tōeki and lifted it out of the original's shadow.

What Tōeki's Brush Gives Away

A faithful copy is not a mechanical one. The job was to reproduce Sesshū's composition across all sixteen meters, season by season, and the scroll holds to that outline. Yet the handling is recognizably Tōeki's. Where Sesshū's brush can feel charged and restless, Tōeki tends toward firmer construction and a cooler, more ordered sense of form, the same geometric clarity that runs through his independent landscapes. Specialists regard the result as remarkable precisely because it manages two things at once: it stays loyal to the model while standing on its own as a painting.

For a visitor, the reward is comparison. When the scroll is shown, the pleasure lies in tracing how a seventeenth-century master read a fifteenth-century one, where he followed exactly and where his own temperament took over. Seeing it near the National Treasure original, as happened when it first went on public view, turns the two scrolls into a conversation across two hundred years.

Seeing It in Hōfu

The Mōri Museum occupies the former main residence of the Mōri family, who ruled the Hagi (Chōshū) domain and held the rank of duke in the modern era. The residence, completed in the early twentieth century, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2011, and its surrounding garden became a nationally designated Place of Scenic Beauty in 1996. The grounds run to roughly 84,000 square meters of pine-lined paths, lawns, and a large pond, and a single visit easily combines the collection, the house, and the garden.

One practical note matters most. This scroll is fragile and very long, so it is not on permanent display. It appears only in occasional special exhibitions; its first public showing came in the autumn of 2023, alongside other newly designated Unkoku works. Anyone hoping to see it, or the Sesshū original, should check the museum's exhibition schedule before traveling. The museum keeps hours of 9:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:30, and closes over the year-end. It sits about six minutes by bus from JR Hōfu Station; take a Bōchō bus toward Amidaji and get off at Mōri Hontei-iriguchi. Hōfu Tenmangū, one of the oldest shrines to the deity of learning, is a short trip away and pairs well with a museum visit.