Cat with Poems: Pictorial Parody of Priest Saigyo's Legend

Cat with Poems: Pictorial Parody of Priest Saigyō's Legend is a hanging scroll in ink and color on paper by Matsumura Goshun (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971.190), painted in the late eighteenth century. The composition is a mitate-e — a pictorial parody in which a familiar literary or historical subject is restaged with a contemporary or comic substitute — here recasting the famous Heian-period waka poet-priest Saigyō (1118-1190) as a small cat. Saigyō, who left the warrior class to take Buddhist orders and traveled widely in the western provinces, was one of the most beloved poets of the Japanese tradition and a recurring figure in painting from the medieval period onward, conventionally depicted as a wandering monk in a wide hat with a staff. Goshun's substitution of the cat draws on the long tradition of Japanese animal painting and on the haikai sensibility he had inherited from his teacher Yosa Buson, in which everyday subjects were treated with literary seriousness and classical subjects with affectionate humor. The poems written above the cat — almost certainly contributed by Goshun's haikai friends — extend the parody into a multi-voice literary game. The scroll entered the Met in 1971 and stands as one of the museum's clearest documents of the literary-painterly culture of late-eighteenth-century Kyoto in which Goshun was a central participant.