Figures in a Boat

Signed and dated lower right 'H. Nakagawa 1903,' this watercolour places the artist firmly in the year before his selection by the Japanese government for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition delegation, alongside Yoshida Hiroshi and Mitsutani Kunishirō. Three or four figures are arranged in the well of a small flat-bottomed riverboat, one apparently working a stern oar, the others bundled against the cold or rain; the boat is set against a low, broadly washed horizon of muted grey-greens. The painter's manner here is more linear and observational than in his late Taishō coastal studies — the figures are individuated to the extent that one can read the cant of a head and the line of a shoulder, and the boat itself is drawn with the careful attention to construction (transom, gunwale, oarlock) that bears the imprint of Koyama Shōtarō's Fudōsha drawing discipline. The 1903 dating places the work within the immediate prelude to Nakagawa's first major international exposure, and it serves as a useful benchmark for assessing the development of his hand across the next two decades.