Bush Clover, Grass and Cricket

Bush Clover, Grass and Cricket is a hanging scroll in color on paper by Matsumura Goshun (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 36.100.37), painted in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The composition pairs bush clover (hagi) and autumn grasses with a small cricket — a combination drawn from the deep well of autumn imagery in Japanese poetry, where hagi is one of the seven autumn flowers and the cricket's song is associated with the lengthening evenings of the early autumn months. Goshun handles the subject in the manner that became foundational for Shijō bird-and-flower painting: closely observed plant and insect forms, rendered with the soft graduated color washes that the school favored, set against generous expanses of bare paper that gave the composition its sense of seasonal atmosphere. The scroll is signed Goshun and bears one of his characteristic seals. It entered the Met in 1936 as part of the Howard Mansfield Collection and is among the museum's early-acquired examples of Shijō painting in the kachō-ga genre that Goshun's pupils — most notably his younger brother Matsumura Keibun and later painters such as Kōno Bairei and Imao Keinen — would carry into the Meiji period.