At the Equator

At the Equator (赤道直下にて, 1898), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, was painted during the southbound passage of Ōshita Tōjirō's 1898 voyage to Australia, somewhere in the equatorial belt of the western Pacific or eastern Indian Ocean. The horizontal watercolour, worked on board ship, shows a wide horizon of open tropical sea under a low, heavy band of cumulus cloud, the water rendered in cool blues and silver-greys and the cloud in soft pinks and warm whites, with no land visible — a deliberately empty composition that was almost unprecedented in late-Meiji Japanese painting. The work belongs to the small body of Pacific and Australian watercolours that Ōshita produced during his six-month journey, and is the earliest substantial body of Pacific oceanic painting in modern Japanese art; together with Port Melbourne and the small Australian landscape studies that he brought back to Tokyo, it forms a coherent travel-painting cycle that he used as the basis of illustrated journalism for the Tokyo press of 1898–1899. The composition's empty horizon, almost contemplative in its simplicity, marks Ōshita's confidence in transferring the European plein-air watercolour idiom to subject matter that the Japanese pictorial tradition had no convention for.