Ōiso Shigitatsu-an

Held by the Kagoshima City Museum of Art (the principal collection of Kuroda Seiki's work in his native Satsuma), Ōiso Shigitatsu-an (大磯鴫立庵, 1896) depicts the celebrated late-seventeenth-century thatched hermitage of Shigitatsu-an at Ōiso on Sagami Bay, a hut built by the haikai poet and Buddhist priest Sōgi Daisō in 1664 to commemorate Saigyō's twelfth-century waka 'Kokoro naki / mi ni mo aware wa / shirarekeri / shigitatsu sawa no / aki no yūgure' (Even one who has renounced the world / knows the sadness / of the autumn dusk / when the snipe rise from the marsh). The site had been a destination of literary pilgrimage for more than two centuries by Kuroda's time and was a natural subject for an artist who was self-consciously placing the Western oil medium in dialogue with the inherited Japanese landscape tradition. The composition was painted in the year Kuroda founded the Hakubakai and assumed the leadership of the Western Painting Department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and belongs to the small group of pivotal 1896 landscapes through which he established the chromatic and atmospheric vocabulary of the new yōga. The Kagoshima City Museum example, located in his birthplace, documents the immediate post-Paris phase in which he was systematically translating the French plein-air idiom into Japanese topographic, literary, and historical subjects.