WASHINGTON — Within the protective dimness of the display space at the National Gallery of Art, the Japanese bird-and-flower paintings of Ito Jakuchu achieve a transcendent luminosity.

Even if Asian screen art is not your thing, the degree of refinement, composition, movement and narrative in these national treasures of Japan will leave you breathless.

For gardeners, the treat is compounded by Jakuchu’s deep connection to the natural world. On 30 silk scrolls, he captures the teeming, chaotic essence of life at our feet.

Jakuchu made these masterpieces over a 10-year period in the mid-18th century, applying ink, paint and gold to the woven silk scrolls. The exhibition, “Colorful Realm,” can be seen in the gallery’s West Building through April 29.

God, or Buddha, is in the details: The way the autumn sunbeams backlight the red maple leaf, the sad tracery of the twiggy plum tree in winter, the eye-catching streaking of the gumpo azalea.

Jakuchu elevates these moments to the finest art. In one, a flock of garden-variety sparrows alights on heads of millet. The subject idea seems pretty dull, but Jakuchu charges the scene of the arriving flock with giddying energy. A lone white sparrow is a symbol of abundance, writes curator Yukio Lippit in the exhibition catalog. The millet stalks are bowed by the weight of the seedheads.

By the mid-18th century, the genre of bird-and-flower paintings was well established in Chinese, Korean and Japanese art. But Jakuchu took it to the highest level. He was the son of a wealthy Kyoto merchant who left the stresses of the family business to immerse himself in his art and spiritual meditation. One of his obvious artistic skills is in the play of positive and negative space, a relationship that is always masterfully tense and interesting. This is taken to extreme in one of his earliest scrolls, “Peonies and Butterflies,” in which various species of butterfly make their way to a lower effusion of peony blooms in white, pink and scarlet.

The butterflies are arranged flat and outspread, and the flowers too have a mannered flatness to them. And yet from this two-dimensionality Jakuchu brings a powerful depth and sense of movement in all the scrolls.

Peonies figure large in his work, as do chrysanthemums, but viewers will see his lovely depictions of clematis, morning glories, hibiscus, gourds and lots more.

Jakuchu cataloged the floral universe of East Asia at a time when Japan was closed to the West, when these beauties were known perhaps to a few botanists or, in the case of the peony, in a few Western gardens by way of China. You can see why horticulturists went gaga once these plants began to flow to Europe and North America in the late 19th century.