Calm

Held by the Tokyo National Museum, Calm is one of the seascape compositions in which Fujishima Takeji developed the broad, simplified, almost abstract treatment of water and sky that would define the long sequence of sunrise paintings he produced in the 1930s. The composition reduces the scene to a horizontal band of luminous sea and a corresponding band of sky, with minimal incident in the middle ground, and develops the relationship between the two through the kind of broad chromatic effect that Fujishima had absorbed both from his early nihonga training under Kawabata Gyokushō and from his European study of late nineteenth-century European tonal landscape. The painting belongs to the body of mature Japanese seascapes through which Fujishima, after his return from Europe in 1910 and during his long professorship at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, articulated a distinctively Japanese version of the romantic seascape — drawing on the Pacific coastlines around Cape Inubō, Cape Muroto, the Daiō Peninsula, and other sites that he visited and re-visited in his later years. The Tokyo National Museum example documents the meditative late phase of Fujishima's career, the period in which his work returned to broad atmospheric color planes and earned him the inaugural Order of Culture in 1937.