Happy Forest, from Water Margin

Happy Forest, from Water Margin is a hanging scroll in ink and color on paper by Matsumura Goshun (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1986.95), dated to the late eighteenth century. The subject is drawn from the Chinese vernacular novel Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin, Japanese: Suikoden), the great Ming-period romance of one hundred and eight outlaws who gather at Mount Liang under the leadership of Song Jiang in defiance of the corrupt Song-dynasty government. The Water Margin entered Japan through Chinese editions in the early Edo period and became a major source for Japanese popular literature, drama, and pictorial art, particularly after Takebe Ayatari's vernacular Japanese translation of the early 1750s and the Suikoden illustrations of Katsushika Hokusai in the early nineteenth century. The 'Happy Forest' episode involves the outlaw Wu Song's drunken fight with the bullying Jiang Menshen in a tavern called the Happy Forest, and Goshun's treatment captures the loose, almost theatrical energy of the scene in the calligraphic line and color washes characteristic of the Shijō figure-painting manner. The scroll entered the Cleveland Museum in 1986 and is among the museum's earlier-period examples of Japanese painting on Chinese literary themes, a vein that became central to nineteenth-century nanga painting in Kyoto and elsewhere.