Scenes from Essays in Idleness (late 1700s–early 1800s): Art, History and Details

Scenes from Essays in Idleness (late 1700s–early 1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Matsumura Goshun (Japanese, 1752–1811).

The work and its context

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

Matsumura Goshun inscribed passages from Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō’s (1283–1350) well-known collection of anecdotes, Essays in Idleness, across the top of the panels of this screen and its pair. Goshun illustrated the narratives with his vision of the figures who feature in them. The texts cascade down from right to left, forming unique compositional relationships with the images below. The episodes offer a veritable portrait of human idiosyncrasy, from one man’s deep faith in radishes to another’s inability to avoid nicknames.

Object facts

• Title: Scenes from Essays in Idleness
• Date: late 1700s–early 1800s
• Creator attribution: Matsumura Goshun (Japanese, 1752–1811)
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: One of a pair of six-panel folding screens; ink and color on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 146.5 x 330.7 cm (57 11/16 x 130 3/16 in.); Overall: 170.2 x 375.8 cm (67 x 147 15/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Folding screen
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1971.43.1

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Nihonga taisei 日本畫大成. Vol. 14 四條派 Shijōha. Tōkyō: Tōhō Shoin, 1931–34.
• Lee, Sherman E. Japanese Screens from the Museum and Cleveland Collections. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1977.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Unfolding Beauty: Japanese Screens from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

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.