Iris Pavilion (Tokyo)

This medium-sized watercolour, signed at lower right 'H. Nakagawa Tokio' and measuring approximately 12 1/2 by 18 3/4 inches, depicts an iris pavilion of the sort found in the public gardens of late-Meiji and Taishō Tokyo, most likely one of the celebrated iris gardens at Horikiri or Meiji Shrine. A simple covered walkway extends across the picture plane on raised wooden piles, its tiled roof rendered in cool washes of grey and slate-blue; in front of and around the structure, irises rise in clusters of deep violet, mauve, and pale lemon-yellow, set off against the broad flat green of the surrounding water and the muted ochre of the path. The painter's English signature followed by 'Tokio' — a romanisation he favoured in his international watercolours — points to the work having been made either for sale to an American collector in the wake of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition tour or for a foreign visitor to Tokyo in the following two decades. The treatment of the irises themselves is fluent and confident, with the flowers brought forward through quick touches of opaque colour over the broad transparent washes that define water and walkway. The composition typifies Nakagawa's combination of Fudōsha drawing discipline and English atmospheric watercolour, applied here to a subject that sits exactly on the seam between Western pictorial method and native Japanese taste.