Cherry Blossoms at Yoshino

Cherry Blossoms at Yoshino is a hanging scroll painted and inscribed by Rai San'yō in 1827, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 1984.347). Yoshino, in the mountains south of Nara, had been the most celebrated cherry-blossom site in Japan since the Heian period and the symbolic seat of Emperor Go-Daigo's exiled Southern Court in the fourteenth century, and the trip San'yō made there with his elderly mother Baishi and his uncle Rai Kyōhei in the spring of 1827 fulfilled a long-held dream. The painting accordingly carries inscriptions in three hands: San'yō's own poem expresses both joy at finally seeing the blossoms and a meditation on Go-Daigo's failed restoration, evoking a neglected imperial grave deep in the mountains; Kyōhei adds a complementary Chinese-verse inscription; and Baishi contributes a kana-script verse reflecting an aged woman's delight at the blossoms one more time. In its small format (47 x 28.7 cm) the work compresses the central concerns of San'yō's mature career — the nanga literati landscape, the kanshi tradition, the family-and-friendship occasion as legitimate subject for serious painting, and the historical-political reading of place that drove his Nihon Gaishi — into a single sheet inscribed by three members of a Confucian household.