Anonymous, Moon over Musashi Moor, Edo period, early 17th century | 武蔵野図屏風　江戸時代前期　17世紀初頭

拍品描述

pair of six-panel folding screens: ink, colour, gold and scattered silver leaf on paper, silk brocade borders, black lacquer mounts, engraved copper-gilt fittings 172 x 380.4 cm. (when unfolded) 172 x 63.4 cm. (when folded) Autumn grasses and flowers rise from a malachite green ground. Plumes of miscanthus (susuki) echo the scalloped form of the golden clouds above, while dianthus, bellflower, bush clover and mugwort are interspersed among the tall grasses. The moon appears faintly through the foliage, rendered in silver leaf; scattered silver flecks throughout the grasses suggest the night sky glimpsed through the verdure, with sky, cloud, moon and earth appearing to merge into a single continuous field. Musashino, the plain once extending across the Kanto region southwest of present-day Edo, is counted among the classical meisho, or ‘famous places’ of Japanese poetry and painting, celebrated since antiquity for its expanse of open grassland and mentioned as early as the Man'yoshu [lit. Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves]. The theme was given its most famous literary treatment in Chapter 12 of the tenth-century Tale of Ise (Ise monogatari), in which a fleeing woman, hidden with her lover among the grasses of Musashino, begs the pursuing governor: “Please don’t burn, / don’t burn, the grasses/ of the Musashi Plain. My beloved hides here, / and I do, too.”1 The association with Musashi Moor and the moon became a recurring poetic convention. It is thought that the tradition began in a poem by Minamoto no Michikata (1189-1238): The plains of Musashi have no mountain peaks into which the moon can slip, as white clouds enshroud spears of plume grasses.2 Musashino wa tsuki no irubeki mine mo nashi obana ga sue ni kakaru shirakumo Fujiwara no Yoshitsune (1169-1206) also writes in the Shin kokin wakashu [New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern]: my destination and the sky become one on Musashi Moor where from distant field grasses there emerges bright moonlight.3 yukusuwe ha sora mo hitotsu no Musashino ni kusa no hara yori idzuru tsukikage For comparison, there is another pair of screens depicting Musashi Moor and Mount Fuji in the collection of the Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo, go to: https://www.suntory.com/sma/collection/gallery/detail?lang=en&id=543 1. Translated in Peter MacMillan, The Tales of Ise, London, 2016, p. 21. 2. Translated by John T. Carpenter in "The Plains of Musashi", The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The MET), accession no. 67.235, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/45262 3. Translated by Laurel Rasplica Rodd in Shinkokinshu: New Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern (Leiden, 2015), p. 181, no. 422.

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