Casually Created on a Spring Day

Murase Taiitsu’s painting is paired with his own poem that reads:

The world's fortunes rise and fall, and my heart churns without repose.

I am almost like a fish in a boiling cauldron.

Flowers are red, the willows green; spring is as ever.

I wander through the forest to visit a humble tavern.

The person in the scene gazes up at a tree’s branches, a tavern’s banner waving in the distance. After studying with a Confucian scholar in Kyoto, Taiitsu started his own school. His peers considered him eccentric and many accounts of his unusual behavior survive.