Seventy-Two Peaks Under the Blue Sky with Mount Furong

Seventy-Two Peaks Under the Blue Sky with Mount Furong is an eight-panel folding screen by Matsumura Goshun in ink with gold and silver foil on paper (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980.28), dated 1785 — placing it in the years just after Yosa Buson's death and Goshun's return from Ikeda to Kyoto, when he was beginning to absorb the Maruyama-school methods that would shape his mature style. The subject is an imagined Chinese landscape: the seventy-two peaks of Mount Hua in Shaanxi province, with Mount Furong (Hibiscus Peak) among them — one of the great topographic set-pieces of Chinese poetry and painting, made famous by Tang and Song writers and frequently treated by Japanese nanga painters of the eighteenth century. Goshun renders the panoramic mountainscape across the full eight-panel sweep in literati ink, with the gold and silver foil ground providing a luminous, atmospheric background that lifts the composition out of pure ink-monochrome and into the decorative register expected of formal screen painting. The work is one of Goshun's largest and most ambitious surviving compositions and is among the principal documents of Shijō landscape painting in any American collection. It was acquired by the Cleveland Museum in 1980 through the John L. Severance Fund.