Woodcutters and Fishermen

Woodcutters and Fishermen is a pair of six-panel folding screens (byōbu) in ink and color on paper by Matsumura Goshun (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.300.206.1, .2), painted about 1790-95 during the most productive years of the artist's career. The subject — woodcutters in the mountains paired with fishermen at the water's edge — is one of the great set-pieces of East Asian landscape painting, descending from the Tang dynasty literary topos of the four virtuous occupations (fisherman, woodcutter, farmer, scholar) and through countless later Chinese and Japanese renderings to its place in the Kanō and nanga repertoires. Goshun's treatment uses the full twelve-panel sweep to construct an extended landscape in which the figures are placed against atmospheric ink-and-color terrain, with the lyrical brushwork he had developed under Yosa Buson tempered by the close attention to figure and gesture he had absorbed from Maruyama Ōkyo's circle. The pair entered the Met as part of the Mary Griggs Burke Collection, one of the most important post-war gifts of Japanese art to an American museum, and is among the principal documents of Goshun's mature handling of the multi-panel screen format that defined elite Kyoto painting in the late eighteenth century.