Sailing Vessels Pulled Ashore

This impressionist depiction of small sailing vessels pulled ashore — their masts upright, their sterns angled together on the wet sand and their sails draped over their hulls like loose textiles — is one of the most freely handled of Nakagawa's surviving coastal studies. Signed lower right 'H. Nakagawa' and undated, but evidently completed before the artist's death in 1922, the sheet works in a near-monochromatic key: pale slate-grey for sky, a long warm-grey horizon band for the distant shoreline, ochre and umber for the wet ground, with the boats themselves rendered in a quick, calligraphic series of strokes that owes as much to brush-and-ink discipline as to Western watercolour technique. The compositional simplicity — five or six similar vessels arranged loosely along a diagonal — is characteristic of Nakagawa's mature work; he tends to avoid the picturesque accent of figures or buildings in his shoreline pictures and instead allows the contrast of cool wet sand against warm-grey rigging to do the entire pictorial work. The drawing of the hulls, with their distinctive flat sterns and shallow draught, marks them as Japanese bezai-sen or smaller coastal cargo vessels of the type still in use along the inland sea at the turn of the twentieth century.