Oath of the Peach Garden, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Oath of the Peach Garden, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a hanging scroll in ink and color on silk by Matsumura Goshun (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1987.35), dated to about 1780 — that is, the years immediately before Goshun's withdrawal from Kyoto to Ikeda following the deaths of his father and wife, and before his eventual association with the Maruyama school. The subject is one of the most famous episodes from the Chinese historical novel Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), in which the three sworn brothers Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei pledge their mutual loyalty in the garden of a peach orchard, sealing the alliance that would shape the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 CE). The narrative was a staple of late Ming and Qing Chinese painting and printmaking and entered Japan early in the Edo period; for nanga painters of Goshun's generation, schooled in the Chinese classics, it was a natural subject for hanging-scroll figure painting. Goshun renders the three figures and the surrounding peach blossoms in the literati manner he had absorbed from Yosa Buson, with calligraphic line and loose color washes capturing both the ceremonial gravity of the oath and the seasonal beauty of the blossoming garden. The scroll entered the Cleveland Museum in 1987 through the Severance Fund and is one of the museum's principal documents of Goshun's early-career engagement with Chinese literary subject matter.