Cleveland Museum of Art
Scenes from Essays in Idleness
Matsumura GoshunLinkedCulture matchlcp-72453c890cdf
- Date
- late 1700s–early 1800s
- Medium
- One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink and color on paper
- Culture
- Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
- Department
- Japanese Art
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 146144
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
Matsumura Goshun inscribed passages from Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283–1350) well-known collection of anecdotes, Essays in Idleness, across the top of the panels of this screen and its pair. Goshun illustrated the narratives 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. The episodes offer a veritable portrait of human idiosyncrasy, from one man’s deep faith in radishes to another’s inability to avoid nicknames.
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Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund
- Provenance
- ?–1971: (Mathias Komor [1909–1984], New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) | 1971–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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