Ōshita Tōjirō

Ōshita Tōjirō (大下藤次郎, 1870–1911) was the founding figure of modern Japanese watercolour painting, the editor and publisher of the magazine Mizue — which began under his hand in 1905 and would become, across the Taishō and Shōwa decades, one of the most influential art periodicals in Japan — and a tireless evangelist for plein-air landscape practice in a country whose Western-style painters had until then overwhelmingly preferred oils. Although he died at forty-one, before the maturity of either the shin-hanga or sōsaku-hanga print movements, the watercolour culture that he created in the first decade of the twentieth century was part of the soil from which Yoshida Hiroshi and a generation of pre-war landscape painters and printmakers grew, and he remains, in the standard Japanese accounts of the Meiji yōga movement, the pioneer of the country's watercolour tradition.

He was born on 5 August 1870 — the ninth day of the seventh month of the third year of Meiji by the old lunar calendar then still in use in Japan — in the Hongō district of central Tokyo (present-day Bunkyō ward), the son of a merchant family that ran a travellers' inn, a stable for post-horses and a small carriage business in the booming new city. His given name was Tōjirō; the surname Ōshita is written 大下. He grew up in the densely packed Hongō neighbourhood that was then home to the new Tokyo Imperial University and to a thick cluster of writers, doctors and Meiji-era reformers, and the lively printed culture of the area — illustrated weeklies, mass-market magazines, the early picture books of Western-style art — shaped his sense of what an artist's career might mean. Although his family expected him to take over the businesses, he had begun to draw seriously by his late teens and at the age of nineteen, in 1889, he resolved to pursue art rather than commerce.

He began his training under Nakamaru Seijūrō (1841–1896), a painter of the late Edo and early Meiji years who had absorbed the Western drawing then being introduced into Japan and who taught watercolour technique to the new generation of Meiji youth. From Nakamaru he learned the rudiments of the European watercolour tradition — a careful, almost cartographic style of grey-brown tonal wash overlaid with restrained colour. He then entered the orbit of Harada Naojirō (1863–1899), one of the most cosmopolitan painters of the early Meiji yōga movement; Harada had trained in Munich under the Bavarian academician Gabriel von Max and brought back to Tokyo a more atmospheric, almost symbolist sense of European painting. Under Harada, Ōshita absorbed both oil painting and the looser, mood-driven manner of late-nineteenth-century European watercolour, and he began to think of watercolour not as a sketching medium ancillary to oil but as an independent medium with its own legitimate exhibition status.

A decisive moment in his artistic formation came in 1893, when he undertook a long sketching journey through the Kazusa region (the southern half of present-day Chiba prefecture) and became convinced of the sufficiency of the Japanese landscape as subject matter for European watercolour. From that point onward his career was committed to the recording of Japanese mountains, fishing villages, river valleys and lakes in transparent watercolour washes, in conscious opposition to the heavier oil practice of his contemporaries in the Hakubakai (the White Horse Society of Kuroda Seiki) and the Meiji Bijutsukai (the Meiji Fine Arts Society of Koyama Shōtarō and Asai Chū). A further catalyst had come the year before, in 1892, when the British painter Alfred Parsons (1847–1920) — a central figure in the transmission of Western watercolour ideas to Meiji Japan — spent many months in the country and exhibited his watercolours in Tokyo; the saturated colour, the breadth of handling and the seriousness of the European watercolour tradition on display helped to legitimise watercolour as a major medium in Japan.

In 1898 he undertook the only long foreign journey of his career, sailing south to Australia and spending some six months in Melbourne and the Victorian countryside. The journey was both a study trip and a journalistic expedition — he wrote and illustrated travel reports for the Tokyo press — and it produced a body of watercolours, including views of Melbourne and of the long sea voyage, that is among the earliest substantial Australian subject matter in modern Japanese painting. The journey gave him direct, sustained exposure to British colonial watercolour practice, which in Australia at that date was a strong school of plein-air landscape (the painters of the Heidelberg School were near-contemporaries), and it confirmed his sense that the European watercolour tradition could be transferred into the recording of Asian and Pacific landscape.

Returning to Tokyo in 1899 he set about the labour for which he is principally remembered: the institutional construction of a Japanese watercolour movement. In 1901 he published Suisaiga no shiori (水彩画之栞, A Guidebook to Watercolour Painting), a practical manual of materials, paper, brushes, washes, sketching method and composition aimed at the educated amateur. The book was an enormous popular success — it was reprinted repeatedly through the 1900s and 1910s, and copies travelled to provincial schools and middle-class households across Japan — and it can fairly be said to have created, almost single-handedly, the Japanese amateur watercolour public of the early twentieth century. The young Yorozu Tetsugorō was one of the many provincial students who, on reading Suisaiga no shiori as a youth, taught himself to paint in watercolour and decided to become an artist. Ōshita followed it with a companion volume, Suisaiga kaitei (水彩画階梯, The Stages of Watercolour Painting), continuing his programme of public education.

Around the turn of the century he was among the artists who formed the Taiheiyō Gakai (太平洋画会, Pacific Painting Association), the successor organisation to the disbanded Meiji Bijutsukai, whose first exhibition opened in Tokyo in January 1902. The group was led by a cohort of painters recently returned from Europe — among them Mitsutani Kunishirō, Nakagawa Hachirō and Yoshida Hiroshi — and Ōshita served on its administrative committee and was one of its principal watercolour figures from the start; the society's exhibitions carried his major watercolour landscapes to the general Tokyo public. In 1905 he founded the Shunchōkai (春鳥会, Spring Bird Society) as a publishing and educational vehicle, and through it launched that year the monthly art magazine Mizue (みづゑ, 'Water Picture'), the first dedicated Japanese watercolour periodical and one of the most important Japanese art magazines of the twentieth century. Mizue carried not only Ōshita's own articles and reproductions of his watercolours, but also reports on European art, technical articles on materials, and high-quality colour reproductions — and after his death it continued as a general art magazine, eventually passing to the firm now known as Bijutsu Shuppansha (Art Publishing Company) and surviving in print far into the twentieth century.

In 1907 he founded the Nihon Suisaiga Kenkyūjo (日本水彩画研究所, Japan Watercolour Painting Research Institute), a small private school in Tokyo for the training of watercolourists, and showed his mountain landscape Hotaka-san no fumoto (穂高山の麓, 'The Foothills of Mount Hotaka') at the first Bunten — the inaugural exhibition of the official Ministry of Education annual salon — that autumn. The Bunten was the central exhibition platform of the Meiji and Taishō periods, and Ōshita's selection in the first edition confirmed his standing as one of the senior watercolourists of his generation. He continued to exhibit at successive Bunten in the years that followed, producing the great mountain-and-lake watercolours — Lake Hibara, Mount Hotaka, the Tama River, the Northern Japan Alps — that are now the best-known body of his work.

Ōshita's sketching journeys took him repeatedly into the Japanese Alps, and in 1909 he produced from a long summer expedition into the Southern Japan Alps a travel narrative and a small body of watercolours that he published that November as Hakuhō no fumoto (白峰の麓, 'The Foothills of the White Peak'). The expedition is one of the early documents of Japanese mountaineering as a literary and artistic genre, and connects his career to the broader cultural moment of the opening of the Japanese mountains to serious art-making. He drew the lakes of the Tōhoku region with particular tenderness — Lake Hibara, in the Bandai mountains of present-day Fukushima, returns repeatedly in his late watercolours — and his long horizontal sheets of Tōhoku and Echigo mountain landscape are now central documents of late-Meiji painting.

In 1911 he undertook a long sketching journey to the Seto Inland Sea and the San'in region of western Honshū, painting at Lake Shinji and along the Izumo coast. Returning to Tokyo in poor health, he died of a sudden illness on 10 October 1911, at the age of forty-one, and was buried at Zōshigaya Cemetery in Tokyo. His Lake Shinji watercolours of that year are the final notes of his career; the Mizue editorial offices and the Shunchōkai's publishing programme passed to his collaborators, who carried the magazine forward for decades after his death.

The Ōshita corpus is held principally in Japanese public collections. The Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum (島根県立石見美術館) maintains the most important single holding of his watercolours, which forms the basis of the modern reproductions and exhibitions of his work; further watercolours, sketchbooks and publications are held by a number of regional Japanese museums in the places he repeatedly painted. In 2014 the Chiba City Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of his work drawn from the Iwami collection, part of a renewed scholarly attention to his role in the genealogy of Japanese watercolour; together, the corpus of his watercolours, his published manuals and the long run of Mizue constitute one of the most institutionally consequential careers in Meiji yōga.