Bush Clover, Grass and Cricket

Bush Clover, Grass and Cricket is a hanging-scroll painting by Matsumura Keibun, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 36.100.37), depicting an autumn scene of bush clover (hagi) and grass animated by a single cricket. The combination is one of the small, finely calibrated subjects on which the Shijō school's bird-and-flower practice was built: hagi is among the seven autumn flowers (akinanakusa) celebrated in classical waka and renga from the Man'yōshū onward, and the cricket (kōrogi or matsumushi) is the canonical autumn insect of Japanese poetry, its night-time singing standing for the season's combination of beauty and impending cold. Keibun's composition uses the Shijō school's habit of placing a closely observed motif against generous negative space: the hagi spray bends across the upper part of the scroll in a long diagonal, the grass blades are drawn with a sparing, calligraphic line, and the cricket sits among them with the slightly hunched posture of a real autumn insect rather than an emblem. The work demonstrates the painter's command of the kachō-e genre that he inherited from his elder brother Matsumura Goshun and that he himself made the central practice of his three-decade career as head of the Kyoto Shijō school.