Casually Created on a Spring Day (c. 1825–81): Art, History and Details

Casually Created on a Spring Day (c. 1825–81) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Murase Taiitsu (Japanese, 1803–1881).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Murase Taiitsu’s painting is paired with his own poem that reads: The world's fortunes rise and fall, and my heart churns without repose. I am almost like a fish in a boiling cauldron. Flowers are red, the willows green; spring is as ever. I wander through the forest to visit a humble tavern. The person in the scene gazes up at a tree’s branches, a tavern’s banner waving in the distance. After studying with a Confucian scholar in Kyoto, Taiitsu started his own school. His peers considered him eccentric and many accounts of his unusual behavior survive.

Object facts

• Title: Casually Created on a Spring Day
• Date: c. 1825–81
• Creator attribution: Murase Taiitsu (Japanese, 1803–1881)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868) to Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 135.1 x 31.5 cm (53 3/16 x 12 3/8 in.); Mounted: 191.7 x 43.6 cm (75 1/2 x 17 3/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1981.86

A detail from the museum

Murase Taiitsu was fond of farting, and even had a seal reading "Fart Master."

Collection credit

Gift of Dr. Kurt A. Gitter

Further reading listed by the museum

• Addiss, Stephen. A Japanese Eccentric : The Three Arts of Murase Taiitsu. [New Orleans]: New Orleans Museum of Art, 1979.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1981.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 2 (February 1982): 39–82.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.