Maruyama Ōkyo Paints a Fish’s Journey From Summer Into Autumn

The fish change direction before the painting changes season. On the right, eight young ayu push upstream past a mossed rock and pale pink azaleas. On the left, only three fish remain, larger now, swimming back downstream beneath red maple leaves. Maruyama Ōkyo's 1785 pair is not merely two pictures of fish. Read from right to left, it is a life moving through time.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art currently titles the work Fish in Summer and Autumn. In the reference field on the same object record appears the Japanese title 円山応挙筆　春秋遊魚図 — literally invoking spring and autumn rather than summer and autumn. The mismatch is worth keeping visible. The Met itself identifies the flowers in the right-hand scroll as spring azaleas while describing the young sweetfish as beginning their upstream journey, the phase that leads into their summer life in the river.

Read right to left and the fish grow older

The Met tells viewers that the pair is meant to be read from right to left. That instruction is not just about scroll etiquette. It makes the two images chronological.

The right scroll begins with youth. Eight fish are still small. The Met describes them swimming upstream past a mossy rock and spring azaleas. The left scroll shows a different state: spring and summer have passed, the maple has turned crimson, the fish are full-grown and they are heading back downstream toward the coast.

One pair of scrolls therefore carries three kinds of change at once: body size, vegetation and direction.

Ōkyo's composition is remarkably close to the actual life of an ayu

Ayu, or sweetfish, are one of Japan's great seasonal fish because their season is built into their biology. Kyoto Prefecture describes them as nengyo — “year fish.” Juveniles that have grown in coastal water move upstream in spring, then spend the short river phase feeding and growing until the autumn spawning season.

A Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism account of wild ayu makes the cycle explicit. Adults spawn in the middle and lower river in autumn. Newly hatched larvae drift down to the sea. They spend roughly half a year in marine and estuarine water. When the water warms in spring, the juveniles begin the upstream migration. Summer is growth in the river. Autumn brings the downstream movement toward spawning grounds and the end of the one-year life.

The mature fish descending in autumn are commonly called ochi-ayu, “falling” or descending ayu.

There is no evidence that Ōkyo intended the painting as a scientific life-cycle chart. The Met does not call it one. Yet the seasonal directions are biologically meaningful, and that matters for an artist whose reputation was built on looking at the natural world instead of merely repeating inherited forms.

Shasei does not mean “paint it like a photograph”

Ōkyo is inseparable from the Japanese term shasei, usually translated as drawing or painting from life. Modern viewers can make it too simple by treating it as a synonym for photorealism.

Kyoto National Museum makes a more useful distinction. Japanese artists had sketched plants and animals from observation long before Ōkyo, but the sketch was often preparatory. From the mid-18th century, Ōkyo helped move observed reality into the logic of the finished painting itself.

Tokyo National Museum's surviving Sketchbooks, probably dating largely from the 1770s, show the intensity of that habit. The museum links Ōkyo's observational practice to a broader Edo-period rise in interest in natural history.

Shasei, then, is not merely exact contour. It is a decision to let what has actually been seen alter what a finished painting can be.

The fish are observed, but the river is designed

That distinction is visible here. The ayu are convincing bodies in water, but this is not a map of a named stream. The water is simplified into current, pale wash and line. The plants are selected to make season legible. The two scrolls have been edited so that the biological story is clearer than any literal slice of riverbank would be.

Kyoto National Museum's description of another Ōkyo work, Two Deer, offers a useful formula: meticulous observation fused with the decorative tradition associated with earlier Japanese painting. That fusion is central to the fish pair as well.

Observation did not destroy design. It gave design new evidence.

A farmer's son became the painter who reset Kyoto's visual standard

Kyoto National Museum records Ōkyo's birth in 1733 in Anō village in Tanba, now part of Kameoka in Kyoto Prefecture. As a teenager he went to Kyoto and is said to have entered the studio of the Kano-school painter Ishida Yūtei.

His visual education widened quickly. He studied Chinese painting traditions and Western-style perspective. MIHO MUSEUM notes that, while earning a living, he worked with megane-e — perspective pictures made to be viewed through optical devices — and copied or adapted Chinese examples. That experience sharpened his attention to spatial recession.

He also absorbed the naturalistic tendencies of Chinese bird-and-flower painting associated with Shen Nanpin and the observational example of painters such as Watanabe Shikō.

Kyoto National Museum's 2024 exhibition marking 290 years since Ōkyo's birth summarized the result: he studied Western pictorial techniques and a wide range of Chinese painting, then placed shasei at the foundation of practice to create a clear, graceful style that became enormously popular.

When Ōkyo appeared, “all Kyoto painting became one hand”

His success was so large that it produced its own criticism. Kyoto National Museum cites the writer Ueda Akinari's famous complaint that after Ōkyo appeared, painting throughout Kyoto had effectively become one manner — everyone was doing shasei.

The remark is useful because it tells us that realism was not a neutral improvement. It was a fashion powerful enough to irritate contemporaries.

The Met says Ōkyo became one of Kyoto's most popular painters and is said to have trained as many as a thousand students. The number should be understood as a traditional measure of scale rather than a verified class register, but the school was indisputably large.

Nagasawa Rosetsu became one of his celebrated pupils. Goshun, after Yosa Buson's death, moved toward Ōkyo's observational style and eventually became founder of the Shijō school. Kyoto's later Maruyama-Shijō tradition carried the consequences of Ōkyo's way of seeing into the 19th century and, through modern nihonga, far beyond it.

1785 was a mature year for an artist who could paint a peacock or a river fish

The Met says Ōkyo signed and dated the left scroll 1785 and calls the year a pinnacle of his prolific career.

MIHO MUSEUM owns a Peacock also dated 1785 and notes that bird-and-flower subjects may show Ōkyo's observational technique most clearly. Peacocks were a celebrated specialty: exotic, luxurious and suitable for prestigious commissions.

The sweetfish pair is almost the opposite in social temperature. The subject is ordinary enough to be eaten, caught, watched in rivers and associated with the changing season. The artist who could make a spectacular peacock also gave his mature attention to a small migratory fish.

That is part of the democratic force of shasei: something does not have to be rare to be worth seeing closely.

Eight fish becoming three is not a mortality statistic

The arithmetic tempts narrative. Eight juveniles appear on the right, only three adults on the left. It would be easy to invent a story in which five fish have died on the way to maturity.

Nothing in the public object record supports that interpretation. The Met does not assign symbolic meaning to the numerical reduction, and Japan.co.jp does not turn it into biological accounting.

What changes unmistakably is the character of the group. The right-hand fish are small and numerous. The left-hand fish are larger and fewer. The composition moves from youthful abundance to a more spacious mature return.

The life story is carried by state and direction, not by keeping track of individual fish.

Ayu connect this New York painting back to Kyoto's rivers

Ayu are not merely a generic Japanese-season symbol in the region where Ōkyo made his career. Kyoto Prefecture still counts migrating ayu on the Kamo River system. The prefecture says fish making the journey from Osaka Bay to the Kamo can travel roughly 100 kilometers through the Yodo River system.

That modern monitoring program obviously does not identify the river in Ōkyo's painting. The pair has no documented named location, and it would be irresponsible to call it a Kamo River scene.

But the contemporary ecology helps restore scale. An upstream ayu in Kyoto is part of a real journey between sea and inland water, not an abstract decorative arrow.

The two scrolls show spring and autumn — and make us imagine winter

There is no winter scroll. There is no sea. No spawning bed, egg or drifting larva appears.

Yet once the ayu's life history is understood, the absent seasons become active. The adults heading downstream in autumn are moving toward spawning. The next generation will drift seaward, spend winter in marine or estuarine water, then return upriver in spring.

The pair therefore appears linear only at first. Right scroll to left scroll. Youth to maturity. Spring to autumn.

Biologically, the left edge loops back toward the next right edge.

Ōkyo can paint a complete life without showing death

Ayu usually die after spawning, which makes the species easy to turn into a metaphor for impermanence. Ōkyo does something subtler. No dead fish appears. The autumn adults are still moving.

He lets direction carry what mortality would otherwise state directly. Young fish ascend. Mature fish descend. A viewer who understands the species knows what lies beyond the left scroll.

This is stronger than attaching a generic philosophical lesson to seasonal art. The finite life is not an abstract doctrine. It is built into one animal's actual ecology.

Why “Summer and Autumn” does not exactly match 春秋

The naming history deserves its own note because the discrepancy is visible in the museum record itself. The current Met title is Fish in Summer and Autumn. The Japanese reference is 春秋遊魚図, which invokes spring and autumn. Earlier Burke Collection cataloguing has also used Sweetfish in Summer and Autumn.

The picture itself occupies the seam between those labels. The flowers on the right are spring azaleas, according to The Met. The juvenile ayu they accompany will spend summer in the river. The left scroll is clearly autumnal through its crimson maple.

The safest conclusion is not that one title is “wrong.” The pair compresses more than two calendar instants. It sets the spring arrival and summer river life of the young fish against the autumn return of adults.

Japan.co.jp therefore preserves both current museum labels rather than silently rewriting one to fit the other.

This is neither a zoological plate nor merely a seasonal decoration

If we call the work scientifically accurate, we risk losing the art. If we call it only lyrical seasonal painting, we risk losing the observation.

Ōkyo needs both.

The fish have believable bodies and meaningful directions. The plants carry seasonal evidence. Then the artist organizes those facts into a pair whose order creates time.

That may be the most useful way to understand his realism. Observation is not the destination. It is the material from which an unusually clear design becomes possible.

Today’s Art Choice: autumn begins when the fish turn around

Early September is still too early for crimson maples in much of Japan. That makes this an unusual autumn selection. The season does not arrive first through leaf color.

It arrives because the fish change direction.

The young ayu have gone upstream. Summer has been spent growing in the river. The adults on the other side of the pair are already returning downstream. The red maple confirms what the fish have told us.

Ōkyo's great subject is not the prettiness of a sweetfish. It is the relationship between close observation and time. To see the fish properly is to know where it is going.

There is an invisible summer between the scrolls and an invisible winter beyond them. There is another spring after that.

Eleven fish, painted in 1785, keep swimming through an entire year.