Cherry Blossoms

Cherry Blossoms is a hanging scroll by Matsumura Goshun (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975.268.77), executed in ink and color on paper in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. The composition presents a single flowering cherry branch rising from the lower edge of the picture into the upper register, with massed white-and-pink blossoms rendered in soft graduated washes against the cream paper ground — a treatment characteristic of the mature Shijō manner Goshun developed in Kyoto after his association with the studio of Maruyama Ōkyo in the late 1780s. The cherry, the supreme seasonal motif of Japanese painting and poetry, carried associations that ranged from the courtly aesthetics of the Heian classics through the warrior ethos of the medieval period to the popular seasonal pleasures of Edo-period flower-viewing. Goshun's treatment shows the synthesis of literary atmosphere (inherited from his teacher Yosa Buson) with the close natural observation that Ōkyo's Maruyama school had codified: the branch structure is observed with care, but the overall composition retains the lyrical, atmospheric quality of haikai painting. The scroll entered the Met as part of the Harry G. C. Packard Collection, one of the most important assemblages of Edo-period Japanese painting in an American institution, and is among the museum's principal documents of late eighteenth-century Kyoto painting.