Scenes from Essays in Idleness
1796
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
About the artist
1796
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Scenes from Essays in Idleness is a 1796 unspecified by Matsumura Goshun, a Nihonga work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
Two folding screens show twelve tall panels side by side. Tiny figures move through misty landscapes while black calligraphy flows down the top of each panel. The words are quotes from a 1300s Buddhist monk’s book of short thoughts. The artist wrote them himself, then painted scenes that match each line. It’s like a visual footnote—words and pictures working together. If you like how text and image play here, look up *Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)*.
Matsumura Goshun inscribed passages from Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283–1350) well-known collection of anecdotes, Essays in Idleness , across the top of each of the twelve panels of this pair of screens. Goshun illustrated the episodes with his vision of the figures who feature in them. The texts cascade down from right to left, forming unique compositional relationships with the images below.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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