Grapevine

Grapevine is a hanging scroll by Matsumura Goshun in ink on silk (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 36.100.20), painted after about 1790 during the last decade of the artist's career. The subject is treated in the Chinese ink-monochrome manner that Goshun had absorbed from his nanga (literati) training under Yosa Buson: trailing vines and densely clustered grape leaves are rendered in broad strokes of ink, with the heavy hanging clusters of fruit suggested through massed dots of darker ink against a silvery ground. Grapevines were a long-established motif in East Asian ink painting, associated with autumn abundance and (through the legendary fourth-century painter Zhang Sengyao and his successors) with the disciplined, virtuoso brushwork that literati painting prized. Goshun's treatment here demonstrates his command of monochrome ink at the height of his career, when his Shijō manner had matured into a confident synthesis of literati brushwork and Maruyama-school natural observation. The scroll entered the Met in 1936 as part of the Howard Mansfield Collection of Asian art, one of the foundational gifts to the museum's Japanese painting collection in the first half of the twentieth century.