Tree Peonies and Chinese Poem on Peonies

Tree Peonies and Chinese Poem on Peonies is a pair of hanging scrolls by Matsumura Keibun, in ink and color on silk, dated to about the 1830s and now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 2022.432.22a, b). Tree peonies (botan) were among the most prestigious flower subjects available to nineteenth-century Kyoto painters: introduced from China and long associated with the Tang court, the Northern Song imperial garden, and the literati painting tradition, they carried with them a heavy weight of poetic and pictorial precedent that a Shijō painter could engage in any of several registers, from monumental classical statement to closely observed garden study. Keibun's treatment, paired with a Chinese poem on peonies inscribed on the companion scroll, places his bird-and-flower practice in dialogue with that Chinese literary inheritance, while his brushwork — graduated washes on the petals, sparing line on the leaves, ample empty silk surrounding the central composition — applies the close-from-life shasei discipline that he absorbed from his elder brother Matsumura Goshun and ultimately from the Maruyama lineage of Maruyama Ōkyo. The pair entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 2022 as part of an important gift of Japanese paintings and offers an excellent example of Keibun's late work, in which the Shijō school's naturalism and the older East Asian tradition of flower painting are brought together at the highest level of finish.