Gathering of Poetic Immortals with Poem Drafts (late 1700s): Art, History and Details

Gathering of Poetic Immortals with Poem Drafts (late 1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Matsumura Goshun (Japanese, 1752–1811); Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783).

The work and its context

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

When Yosa Buson died, his students raised funds for his daughter Kuno’s second marriage by selling their own paintings and calligraphies attached to surviving drafts of Buson’s poetry and commentary. Here, beneath a section of Buson’s manuscripts, Matsumura Goshun painted nine of the poets Buson judged to be the best at haikai, a humorous form of poetry in which poets take turns contributing verses to a poem. In his inscription, Goshun explained that his choice of subject relates to the content of Buson’s text.

Object facts

• Title: Gathering of Poetic Immortals with Poem Drafts
• Date: late 1700s
• Creator attribution: Matsumura Goshun (Japanese, 1752–1811); Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 106.4 x 26.8 cm (41 7/8 x 10 9/16 in.); Mounted with knobs: 184.2 x 34 cm (72 1/2 x 13 3/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1983.188

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Yosa Buson Ten: Botsugo 200-Nen. Tokyo: Nippon Keizai Shimbunsha, 1983.
• Turner, Evan H. “Year in Review for 1983.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71, no. 2 (February 1984): 38–79.
• Tōyō kaiga no seika: tokubetsuten: Kurīvurando Bijutsukan no korekushon kara [東洋絵画の精華: 特别展: クリーヴラント美術館のコレクションから= Highlights of Asian painting from the Cleveland Museum of Art]. Nara, Japan: Nara National Museum, 1998.

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.