Scenes from Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa)

Scenes from Essays in Idleness is a pair of six-panel folding screens in ink and color on paper by Matsumura Goshun (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1971.43.1-.2), dated to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The subject is the Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) of the Buddhist monk Kenkō (Yoshida Kenkō, ca. 1283 – ca. 1352), one of the great works of Japanese prose literature, a loose collection of 243 essays and anecdotes ranging from social observation through aesthetic reflection to Buddhist commentary. Across the twelve combined panels Goshun arranges a sequence of vignettes drawn from selected essays, with figures, dwellings, plants, and landscape elements distributed in groups across the picture plane in the manner of medieval narrative painting (emakimono) but rendered in the open, atmospheric Shijō style. The treatment is characteristic of Goshun's literary-pictorial sensibility: the long tradition of Tsurezuregusa illustration — extending back through medieval painted scrolls and forward into the printed books of the Edo period — is reworked in the soft graduated washes and casual figure-drawing of the late-eighteenth-century Kyoto manner. The pair entered the Cleveland Museum in 1971 through the Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund and is among the museum's principal documents of late Edo-period literary painting.