Plum Blossoms

Plum Blossoms is a hanging scroll in ink and color by Matsumura Keibun, dated to about 1823 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2015.500.9.57a–c). The plum (ume) is among the most heavily freighted subjects available to a nineteenth-century Kyoto painter: it is the first tree to flower at the end of winter, the favorite tree of the ninth-century courtier and god of learning Sugawara no Michizane, the emblem of scholarly endurance in cold conditions, and the standard early-spring motif of Chinese and Japanese painting traditions reaching back to the Northern Song. Keibun's treatment draws on the Shijō school's practice of closely observed botanical drawing, learned from his elder brother Matsumura Goshun and ultimately from the Maruyama lineage of Maruyama Ōkyo: the branches are placed in a long diagonal across the silk, the blossoms are drawn with a careful gradation of color, and the empty surrounding ground allows the composition to function as both a naturalist's record and a lyric image charged with the long literary tradition of the plum in classical and Edo-period poetry. The painting entered the Metropolitan as part of the major 2015 Mary Griggs Burke Collection gift, the single largest gift of Japanese paintings ever made to the museum, and is an important example of Keibun working in the most prestigious of the seasonal flower subjects.