Cherry Blossoms in Sendai

Cherry Blossoms in Sendai (仙台の桜, 1881), held in the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art / Bandaijima Art Museum, is one of the founding documents of plein-air landscape painting in Japan and the most important of Koyama Shōtarō's surviving early oils. Painted on a sketching tour to Sendai in the spring of 1881 — the year that his teacher Kawakami Tōgai died — the small horizontal canvas (approximately 39.5 by 60.8 cm) records a flowering cherry tree at the edge of a clearing, the heavy mass of pale blossom rendered against a soft, overcast Tōhoku sky, with the tonal architecture of the painting carried by the warm umbers of the foreground earth and the cool grey-greens of the middle distance. The handling is direct and tonal in the manner Koyama had learned three years earlier from Antonio Fontanesi, and the painting belongs to the same brief moment in early-Meiji yōga as Asai Chū's celebrated 1881 Harvest scenes — a moment in which the first generation of Japanese oil painters was testing the European plein-air method against the recognisably Japanese motifs that would still be available to it after the abolition of the domains and the modernisation of the cities. The painting was acquired by the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art as part of the regional collection devoted to Koyama as a son of Echigo, and it remains the most reproduced image of his landscape work and the standard early-yōga example in survey histories of Meiji painting.