Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Farmer Returning Home in Autumn
Yosa Buson (Japanese, 1716–1783)
1781
- Medium
- Hanging scroll; ink and light color on silk
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 203.2 x 59.2 cm (80 x 23 5/16 in.); Painting only: 130.8 x 46.2 cm (51 1/2 x 18 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Japanese Art
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Here, Yosa Buson’s farmer playfully chastises a crow who has come to dine on his grain while his water buffalo earnestly negotiates a swift stream. Raised in what is now Osaka, Buson went to Edo (now Tokyo) to study poetry composition. He later traveled around northeastern Japan, following in the footsteps of poet Matsuo Bashō (松尾芭蕉) (1644–1694), and then taught poetry in Kyoto. He painted professionally, a skill he learned by using wood-block–printed Chinese painting manuals.
