The Cross-temporal Conversations of Matsumura Goshun (1752-1811): Lineages of Style in Poetry and Visual Representation

The Japanese painter and poet Matsumura Goshun (1752-1811) had a complicated history with lineages, at once deeply embedded in several and disruptive of each. From his family’s multigenerational history of working in the Kyoto mint, to his sequential adoption of the styles of Yosa Buson (1716-1783) and Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795), respectively, to the creation of the hybrid Shijō style, combining Buson’s bunjinga (literally, ‘literati painting’) and Ōkyo’s shaseiga (literally, ‘drawn from nature’), Goshun embraced an artistic identity whose foundation was at the intersection of different techniques and philosophies of visual representation. This paper traces how Goshun navigated these contrasting and overlapping lineages by focusing on one genre, namely his group portraits of haikai poets from different eras. Akin to the sacra conversazione tradition in Italian Renaissance painting, this genre in which Goshun exceled matched poets, past and contemporaneous, with their poems and with each other, suggesting certain genealogies of style. Through a close analysis of several such Goshun paintings, the paper examines how Goshun’s visual and painterly decisions help construct the narratives of his imagined lineages. Furthermore, it argues that Goshun used the poetic tradition of haikai no renga, rooted in linking and cross-referencing, to subtly establish and express his own multifaceted origin story.