Matsumura Goshun

Matsumura Goshun (1752-1811) was the founder of the Shijō school of Japanese painting and one of the central figures in Kyoto art at the close of the eighteenth century. The school he established — named after the Shijō (Fourth Avenue) district of Kyoto, where he kept his studio — combined the literary and ink-painting refinement of the haikai poet-painter Yosa Buson with the close observation from life (shasei) of Maruyama Ōkyo, producing a distinctive synthesis that would dominate Kyoto painting through the nineteenth century and remain the foundation of Meiji-period nihonga in the Kansai region.

Goshun was born in Kyoto on the 28th day of the third month of the second year of Hōreki (28 April 1752), in a comfortable family with ties to the Kinza (the official mint of the shogunate), where he himself was employed as a young man. His given name was Bun'iku and his common name Kamejirō; he later took numerous studio names, of which Goshun (呉春) became the most lasting, adopted around 1781 in homage to the Chinese city of Suzhou (whose old name Wu, written 呉, he combined with the character for spring, 春). As a young man he studied haikai poetry and painting with Yosa Buson (1716-1784), one of the supreme masters of the Japanese nanga (literati painting) tradition, and Goshun's early work clearly belongs to Buson's circle: ink landscapes in the literati manner, figure paintings based on Chinese subjects, and collaborative haiga (haiku paintings) developed in tandem with poetic composition. He was already a recognized poet in his own right under the name Gekkei, contributing to haikai anthologies of the Tenmei era (1781-1789), and his lifelong involvement with poetry would remain visible in the inscriptions, calligraphic style, and literary subject matter of his later painting.

In 1781 Goshun's life was disrupted by a series of family tragedies — the death of his father and the death of his wife in close succession — and he withdrew from Kyoto to Ikeda, a small town in present-day Osaka Prefecture, where he lived for several years in the country, supporting himself by painting and by association with the local haikai community. Buson died in 1784; Goshun returned to Kyoto in the mid-1780s and gradually came into contact with the studio of Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795), the most important Kyoto painter of the period, whose new manner of detailed observation from living models — applied to birds, animals, plants, and human figures with an empirical care that drew on imported Western perspectival ideas as well as on Chinese realist precedents — was transforming the city's painting scene. The two painters never formed a strict master-and-pupil relationship; rather, Goshun joined Ōkyo's circle as a respected senior collaborator. Most famously, he and Ōkyo worked side by side on a major commission to decorate the Daijō-ji temple in Hyōgo Prefecture in the late 1780s, where the fluency of Goshun's brushwork brought a softer, more lyrical sensibility to the rigorously observational manner that the Maruyama studio had codified.

After Ōkyo's death in 1795, Goshun emerged as the leading painter of Kyoto and the central figure of what came to be called the Shijō school, a network of painters trained either directly under him or through close association with his studio. The name refers to the location of his house and studio along Shijō street, but it also captures a stylistic and pedagogical orientation: a willingness to sketch directly from nature in the Maruyama manner, but tempered by the lyrical brushwork, literary subject matter, and atmospheric ink wash that Goshun had inherited from Buson and from the broader nanga tradition. His works of the 1790s and 1800s display the full range of the mature style: bird-and-flower paintings (kachō-ga) such as the Met's Nightingale on Willow Branch and Bush Clover, Grass and Cricket, with closely observed natural detail set into open compositions full of carefully calibrated negative space; figure paintings in the literati manner like the Met's Monk Renshō Riding His Horse Backwards or the Cleveland Museum's Oath of the Peach Garden and Happy Forest, drawn from Chinese literary and historical sources; large-scale screen compositions such as the Met's Woodcutters and Fishermen (ca. 1790-95) and the Cleveland Museum's Seventy-Two Peaks Under the Blue Sky (1785), the latter a panoramic ink-and-gold treatment of an imagined Chinese mountainscape; and the auspicious figure subjects such as Shōki the Demon Queller (Art Institute of Chicago), which Goshun handled with the kind of inventive freedom that distinguishes Shijō painting from the more standardized treatments of the older Kanō and Tosa schools.

Goshun trained many of the painters who would carry the Shijō manner into the nineteenth century, including his younger brother Matsumura Keibun (1779-1843), who became one of the school's most prolific and widely copied exponents, and Okamoto Toyohiko (1773-1845), Yokoyama Seiki (1792-1864), and Shibata Gitō (1780-1819), among others. Through these pupils and their own students — including, in succession, painters such as Shiokawa Bunrin (1808-1877), Kōno Bairei (1844-1895), Mochizuki Gyokusen (1834-1913), Suzuki Hyakunen (1825-1891), Kōno Tan'yū, Kishi Chikudō (1826-1897), and ultimately the major Meiji and Taishō Kyoto painters Imao Keinen (1845-1924) and Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942) — the Shijō lineage shaped the entire trajectory of Kyoto painting from the late Edo into the modern nihonga of the twentieth century. Goshun himself remained in Kyoto until his death on the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the eighth year of Bunka (4 September 1811), at the age of fifty-nine; he was buried at Konpukuji, the small Pure Land temple north of the city where his teacher Yosa Buson is also interred.

Goshun is rarely encountered today as a printmaker in the strict sense — his medium was overwhelmingly ink and color on silk and paper — but his work appears in the printed record through several routes that make him a foundational figure for any collector of Edo-Meiji Japanese art on paper. His designs and those of his immediate Shijō pupils were reproduced in woodblock-printed painting manuals (gafu) and miscellany books such as the Met's Garden of Pictures by Kyoto Artists (Keijō gaen, 1814), published shortly after his death, and Kinkadō's Album of Drawings by Keibun (1898), in which the Maruyama-Shijō manner was disseminated to amateur painters and collectors throughout Japan. His direct paintings — hanging scrolls, folding screens, fan paintings, and album leaves — are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and many other major collections. Together they document one of the central inflection points of Japanese painting: the moment when the literary inheritance of nanga and the empirical observation of the Maruyama school were brought together into a single working method that gave Kyoto painting its distinctive character for the next century and a quarter.