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Yosa Buson 与謝蕪村
Yosa Buson (1716–1783) was a poet and painter who captured the sensibility of a haikai poet embedded in what we call literati painting. A literati is an idealized figure of a scholar-gentleman who lives in a remote area of the mountains, engaged in deep contemplation. Buson’s literati landscapes are somehow more sensual, more attuned to the temporal conditions of the day than we encounter in many other paintings of this type. For example, viewing Buson’s paintings characteristically includes such sensations as feeling the mist after a rain has just let up, the lighting of the early morning or late evening, or the emerging autumn foliage in the fall season. Buson is considered one of the greatest Edo-period poets along with the seventeenth century master of haiku, Matsuo Bashō.