Monk Renshō Riding His Horse Backwards

Monk Renshō Riding His Horse Backwards is a hanging scroll in ink on paper by Matsumura Goshun (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 36.100.18), dated to approximately 1784 — that is, the years immediately after the death of his teacher Yosa Buson, when Goshun had returned to Kyoto from his withdrawal at Ikeda and was beginning the work that would lead toward his association with Maruyama Ōkyo. The subject is the medieval Buddhist warrior-monk Kumagai Naozane, who took religious vows under the name Renshō after the Battle of Ichi-no-Tani (1184) where he had killed the young Taira warrior Atsumori. According to legend, Renshō rode his horse backwards in symbolic refusal to face east (toward Kyoto, the imperial capital and the seat of worldly authority), keeping his gaze always westward in the direction of Amida's Pure Land. The story is one of the great set-pieces of medieval Japanese narrative and was a recurring subject in nanga painting; Goshun's treatment uses the loose, calligraphic brushwork of literati ink painting to suggest both the figure's monastic asceticism and the absurd, humanizing humor of the conceit, with the horse and its mounted rider rendered against an empty paper ground that gives the picture an air of philosophical concentration. The scroll entered the Met in 1936 as part of the Howard Mansfield gift.