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The Museum · the collection

Old Plum

Kano Sansetsu, 1646. Kyoto, Japan.

You are here

Thirty works are on view at a time, ten to a room. Every day at midnight UTC, the ten that have hung longest go back into storage and ten others come out, so each work hangs for three days and then rests for three. A work always returns to the same place on the same wall.

Four gold-leaf sliding door panels with a huge gnarled dark plum tree trunk bending and zigzagging across them, sprinkled with small white blossoms.
Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0). Select it for the full size.

These four sliding doors, painted for a Kyoto temple, carry a single plum tree across their whole width. The trunk is ancient and enormous. It bends down, turns back on itself, and then shoots sideways in an angular zigzag that seems almost too strong to be real. Small white blossoms appear on the branches, because in Japan the plum blossoms at the end of winter, when little else is in flower. The background is gold leaf, so the tree hangs in a kind of glowing space. When the doors were in use, people would have slid them open and closed and walked through the tree. You can walk along it from one end to the other.

Look closely

  1. Trace the trunk from its base to the farthest branch.
  2. Find the blossoms. How many can you see?
  3. Look for the seams where one door meets the next. How does the tree cross them?

While you sit

An old tree that keeps flowering in the cold. Sit with something that has been through many winters.

Your seat in the galleries: a black twisted-branch bench, its knots capped in brass.

About the work

Title
Old Plum
Artist
Kano Sansetsu
Date
1646
From
Kyoto, Japan
Medium
Four sliding-door panels (fusuma); ink, color, gold, and gold leaf on paper
Size
Overall (of all four panels): 68 3/4 x 191 1/8 in. (174.6 x 485.5 cm)
Rights
Public domain
Image
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0)
Record
The museum's page for this work

The words on this page were written for the campus, not taken from the museum's label.

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