Visiting the Thatched Cottage in the Bamboo Grove

A reclusive scene that Buson particularly enjoyed painting was that of a thatched hut surrounded by bamboo and flanked by a stream. He produced several such “visiting the hermit” pictures (hōin-zu), which feature a man shuffling along a narrow path to visit a recluse deep in the mountains.

Making extensive use of the long, slender hemp-fiber brushstrokes so characteristic of literati painting and rendering the densely layered leaves of the bamboo and assorted trees in fine strokes of black and blue ink, Buson manages to create a picture of gentle, peaceful quietude. This is a distant and ideal place unsullied by the everyday world, where the water is pure and the air clean, a place where a scholar could lead a solitary life close to nature.

Buson signed the painting with his haikai (poetic pen name), “Yahan-ō” (The Old Man of Midnight), and imbued the fresh greenery along the banks of the stream with the feeling of early summer. In doing so, he succeeds in endowing the picture with the lyrical sensibility of haikai poetry, a specialty of his.