Rocks

Yosa Buson Japanese

Not on view

Buson’s expressive painting of a cluster of rocks is accompanied by an inscription by the Japanese Confucian scholar Shibano Ritsuno (1736–1807):

If it is not the leftover material
from patching up the firmament,
it must be the fragment of a falling star.
Cool enough to sober up
the drunken Tō Enmei [Tao Yuanming],
so dense as to be chiseled
into Ō Gishi’s [Wang Xizhi’s] inkstone.
Inscribed by Shiba Sangen

–Trans. Miyeko Murase, Art through a Lifetime: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection, 2013, vol. 1, no. 317, pp. 259, 302.

Rocks, Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783), Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper, Japan

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Rocks, Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783), Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper, Japan
Rocks, Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783), Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper, Japan
Rocks, Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783), Hanging scroll; ink and color on paper, Japan

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