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 the soil from which Yoshida Hiroshi, Maekawa Senpan and a generation of pre-war landscape printmakers grew, and he remains, in the standard Japanese accounts of the Meiji yōga movement, the unrivalled father of the country's watercolour tradition.

He was born on 9 July 1870, in the third year of the Meiji era, in the Hongō district of central Tokyo, the son of a merchant family that ran an inn, a stable for post-horses and a small cart-and-carriage company in the booming new city. His given name was Tōjirō; the surname Ōshita is properly written 大下 ('large-below'). 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 made the difficult announcement that he would pursue art rather than commerce.

He began his training under Nakamaru Seijūrō (1841–1896), the late-Edo-trained painter and military draughtsman who had absorbed Western drawing in the bakufu's Bansho Shirabesho institutes and now ran a small private school in Tokyo teaching watercolour technique to the new generation of Meiji youth. From Nakamaru he learned the rudiments of the European watercolour tradition as it had been carried into Japan through military topographic drawing in the 1860s and 1870s — a careful, almost cartographic style of grey-brown tonal wash overlaid with restrained colour. He then moved into the studio 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.

The 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 discovered — as he would later put it in his own published reminiscences — 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 came in 1892, when an exhibition of watercolours by the British painter Alfred Parsons (1847–1920) and the Anglo-American watercolourist John Varley Jr (1850–1933) was held in Tokyo; the saturated colour, the breadth of handling and the seriousness of the European watercolour tradition shown in those works deeply impressed Ōshita and his contemporaries and helped to legitimise watercolour as a major medium in Japan.

In 1898 he undertook the only long foreign journey of his career, sailing south through the Indian Ocean 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 work, including the well-known watercolours Port Melbourne and At the Equator, that is the earliest substantial Australian subject matter in modern Japanese painting. The journey gave him direct, sustained exposure to British colonial watercolour practice, which at that date in Australia 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 wholesale 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 (水彩畫之栞, 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 teenager, decided to become a painter. In 1904 Ōshita produced a companion volume, Suisaiga kaitei (水彩画階梯, The Stages of Watercolour Painting), continuing his programme of public education.

In 1902 he joined Koyama Shōtarō, Asai Chū, Mitsutani Kunishirō and others in the founding of the Taiheiyō Gakai (太平洋画会, Pacific Painting Association), the successor organisation to the Meiji Bijutsukai, and was one of its principal watercolour figures from the start. The Taiheiyō Gakai's exhibitions of the 1900s and early 1910s carried his major watercolour landscapes — among them the long series of Kantō and Tōhoku mountain studies of the middle decade of the century — to the general Tokyo public, and his pupils and followers in the watercolour section of the society included Maruyama Banka, Ishikawa Toraji and a long roster of regional watercolourists. In 1905 he founded the Shunchōkai (春鳥会, Spring Bird Society) as a publishing and educational vehicle, and through it launched in July of that year the monthly art magazine Mizue (水繪, '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, debate on art-historical questions, and high-quality colour reproductions — and after his death it continued as a general art magazine, eventually passing from the Shunchōkai to Bijutsu Shuppansha (Art Publishing Company), and surviving in print into the late twentieth century as one of the central organs of Japanese modern art criticism.

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 major Hotaka mountain landscape Hotaka-san no fumoto (穂高山麓, '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 through 1908, 1909 and 1910, and produced through these years 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.

Ôshita's sketching journeys took him repeatedly into the Japanese Alps, and in 1909 he produced from a long summer expedition to the Southern Japan Alps a travel narrative and a small body of watercolours that he published as Hakuhō no fumoto (白峰の麓, 'The Foothills of the White Peak'). The expedition was 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 early-Taishō opening of the Japanese mountains to bourgeois recreation and 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 the 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 Honshu, painting at Lake Shinji and along the Izumo coast. Returning to Tokyo in poor health, he died of illness — variously reported as enteritis or typhoid — on 10 October 1911, at the age of forty-one, and was buried at Zōshigaya Cemetery in northern Tokyo. His Lake Shinji watercolours of the spring and summer of that year are the final, melancholy notes of his career; the Mizue editorial offices and the Shunchōkai's publishing programme passed to his collaborators, who carried the magazine forward for more than seventy years 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, the Iwami Collection, which preserves more than two hundred of his watercolours and forms the basis of the modern reproductions and exhibitions of his work; the Tokyo National Museum, the Gunma Museum of Art Tatebayashi, the Chiba City Museum of Art, the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, and a number of regional museums in the locations he repeatedly painted hold supplementary collections of his watercolours, sketchbooks and publications. The 2014 retrospective Suisaigaka: Ōshita Tōjirō at the Chiba City Museum of Art and the 2020 retrospective at the Gunma Museum of Art Tatebayashi, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, brought renewed scholarly attention to his role in the genealogy of Japanese watercolour, and the corpus of his watercolours, his published manuals, and the seventy-year run of Mizue together constitute one of the most institutionally consequential careers in Meiji yōga.