Temple Gate of Zōjō-ji in Shiba

Temple Gate of Zōjō-ji in Shiba (Shiba Zōjō-ji Sanmon), painted around 1890, is one of the earliest surviving Western-medium works by Nakamura Fusetsu and dates from his initial Tokyo apprenticeship under Koyama Shōtarō at the Fudō-sha. The watercolour depicts the great San'gedatsu-mon — the seventeenth-century main gate of the Jōdo-sect head temple Zōjō-ji in the Shiba district of central Tokyo — viewed from the avenue with the upper tier of the gate rising against an open sky, in the meticulous topographical manner that the Meiji yōga generation had inherited from the British topographical watercolourists then being studied in Tokyo through reproductions and through the influence of teachers such as Charles Wirgman. Zōjō-ji, the Tokugawa family temple, was a recurrent subject of Meiji-period yōga because its great wooden gate offered the kind of monumental but vernacular architectural motif on which the new generation of oil-and-watercolour painters could exercise the linear perspective and the carefully graduated shading that distinguished Western from Japanese drawing. The watercolour belongs to the documentary phase of Fusetsu's practice — the years immediately before the Hototogisu illustrations and the Paris stipend — and is the principal early surviving example of the topographical mode in his work.