Farmhouse

Farmhouse (農家) is among the small body of brush-and-watercolour studies that Koyama Shōtarō produced across his later career, painted on paper in the soft, restrained manner that he had learned in the late 1870s from the French watercolourist Abel Guérineau in the Army Topography Department and that he continued to use, alongside his oil practice, for plein-air sketching and casual exhibition. The horizontal sheet shows a low thatched farmhouse half-hidden in a stand of dark deciduous trees, the building's overhanging eaves and weathered timbers caught in a few firm lines of grey-brown wash, with a glimpse of cultivated field at the right and a quiet, even sky above. The drawing is unfussy and tonally compressed, with a palette restricted to greys, ochres and muted greens, and shows none of the brilliant colour that the next generation of Hakubakai watercolourists, Ishii Hakutei in particular, would import from the European watercolour revival. The painting is a representative document of the Fontanesi-Guérineau tradition of sober Romantic landscape watercolour that Koyama carried through his career and transmitted to his Fudōsha pupils, including the young Yoshida Hiroshi, whose own immensely successful watercolour practice grew directly out of the manner of his Fudōsha teacher. As an undated study it cannot be precisely placed, but the manner is consistent with Koyama's mature work of the 1890s and 1900s, and it survives as one of the few representative examples of his watercolour drawing held outside the Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art.