Lun Pu (967-1028), who wrote those words, was famous as a poet and skilled at playing the lute and calligraphy, but poor at go and evidently ashamed of it. What he was probably referring to are the Four Accomplishments, four arts especially esteemed in China from around the 7th or 8th century, mastery of which was considered to be the mark of a well-rounded gentleman-scholar.

As a set these four -- the lute, the game of go, calligraphy, and painting -- became known in Japan under the name kinki shoga, with the lute often represented by the koto, biwa or samisen. In a set of rules for the behavior of Japanese monks and nuns dating from the year 701, playing the koto (lute) and playing go were not restricted. This may reflect the high position that these two arts had achieved even at such an early date.

After the Muromachi era (1336-1573), the theme of the Four Accomplishments was often chosen to adorn hanging scrolls, folding and sliding screens, and eventually ukiyo-e. But in the latter case the persons depicted were usually Japanese beauties instead of Chinese scholars, thereby indicating that ukiyo-e was an art for public consumption.

Sets such as this, and many others of the order of Four Seasons, Five Elements, Eight Views of Lake Biwa, Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido, exemplify a principle of organization much favored by Japanese artists to generate new pictorial ideas within a familiar and accepted framework. In the medium of the woodblock print, each set's design was intended to be capable of standing alone as an independent picture while also yielding a meaning that deepens when viewed in relation to other prints in the same set, and to other versions on the same theme by artists of other centuries -- a tradition of encompassing conceptual brilliance by which it was possible to interweave space with time: the four directions with the past and future.