Dakurō Ryōkatsu Kōyōson Ten (A Tavern in the Yellow-Leaf Village with Murky Sake to Cure Thirst)

Held in the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Dakurō Ryōkatsu Kōyōson Ten (濁醪療渇黄葉村店, 1889) — its long title meaning 'A Village Tavern Among Yellow Leaves Where Murky Sake Cures Thirst' — is the single most important of Koyama Shōtarō's exhibition paintings and the canvas through which his generation defended the brown-keyed Fontanesi line against the emerging Kuroda Seiki orthodoxy. The horizontal oil (63.6 by 105.7 cm) was shown at the second exhibition of the Meiji Bijutsukai in 1890, the year after Koyama had helped found the society with Asai Chū and Matsuoka Hisashi, and it presents an autumnal rural scene of low thatched buildings clustered along a country path, the foliage rendered in the heavy yellows and umbers of late autumn, with two small figures seated at the door of a roadside drinking-shop. The title is drawn from a classical Chinese phrase and gives the painting the literary cast that the Meiji Bijutsukai favoured over the directly observational manner of the rival Hakubakai. Painted in the dense, tonally compressed style that Koyama had carried from Fontanesi's classroom, the work is the most ambitious surviving example of his mature exhibition manner, and was subsequently designated by the Pola Museum as a flagship work of its Meiji yōga holdings. It documents the moment, around 1890, at which the first generation of Japanese yōga painters proved capable of producing exhibition machines comparable in scale and seriousness to the works being shown at the same dates in Paris and London.