The faint melancholy of an autumn pastoral scene, with its ordinary elements such as grasses, chrysanthemums, and somber moon, becomes an epic ode to transience in these golden panels. From a dark green foreground, blooms and grass plumes rise on leafy stems to meet gilded clouds at the upper edge. A common chrysanthemum, depicted over and over again in royal hues, gathers power. Gold on gold, silhouetted against bright and dark swaths, creates a visual dynamic of resplendence and subtlety. A full moon, its silver tarnished over the centuries, imparts a diffuse, timeless loneliness to the panorama.

Characteristic of the late Momoyama and early Edo period, these screens, which might have adorned the home of a wealthy merchant, derive their emotional impact from simple forms, such as the graceful bend of a blade of grass rendered in fine brushwork, that are repeated on a grand scale. The subject is the Musashi Plain, immortalized in the 10th-century Japanese literary classic Tales of Ise as a poignant, desolate landscape where forbidden lovers flee, or are banished-a place of bittersweetness.

In fields of bush clover and hay-scent grass
the autumn moon takes refuge.
The cricket's song is gold.
-Margaret Gibson, from "Autumn Grasses," 2003