Lotus in the Rain

Lotus in the Rain is a hanging-scroll painting by Matsumura Keibun, dated 1832 and held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2013.30.3). The lotus (hasu, ren) is one of the canonical flower subjects of East Asian painting: associated with Buddhist iconography (the lotus rising untainted from muddy water is a standard emblem of enlightenment in Mahāyāna doctrine), with summer in the seasonal painting cycle, and with the contemplative literati tradition that had grown up around the flower in both China and Japan. Keibun's treatment foregrounds the encounter between the flower and the weather: lotus leaves and blossoms are placed against an atmospheric ground rendered with the soft washes of ink that the Shijō school had developed for handling rain, mist, and other weather effects. The painting is signed and sealed in the painter's standard fifty-three-year-old maturity, when he was at the center of Kyoto bird-and-flower painting and was producing some of his most finished pictorial work. The composition's combination of close observation (the leaf veining, the angle of the flower head against the stem) with atmospheric ground (the rain falling through the empty ground around the plant) is a good example of how Keibun adapted the Maruyama school's shasei discipline to the softer, more emotionally charged subjects his elder brother had brought into Shijō practice from Yosa Buson.