Sailing Ship on Shore

An undated coastal study, signed 'H. Nakagawa' in roman letters at lower right and almost certainly executed before the painter's death in 1922, this watercolour belongs to a substantial group of shoreline subjects that Nakagawa produced in the years either side of his 1904 American tour. A small sailing vessel — apparently of the bezai-sen or hansen type characteristic of coastal Japanese inland-sea trade — has been pulled up on a broad mudflat at low tide, its hull canted slightly to one side. The painter handles the composition with the loose, atmospheric brushwork that Koyama Shōtarō's Fudōsha school had absorbed from late-Victorian English watercolour: a long horizontal band of sky in muted grey and rose-pink occupies the upper half of the sheet, while the foreground tidal flat is brought into being through a sequence of thin washes of ochre, slate-blue, and burnt umber. The signature in English script, without accompanying Japanese characters, points to the artist's conscious cultivation of an Anglophone audience — the same audience that purchased the Indianapolis Museum of Art's 'Tanabe Harbor' and 'Dawn' in 1904, and that took so many of his works back to private collections in the American Midwest and East after the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.