Autumn Clouds

Autumn Clouds (秋の雲, 1904), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is among the most atmospheric of Ōshita Tōjirō's mid-career watercolours, and one of the works that articulates most clearly his interest in the meteorological mood of the Japanese landscape. The horizontal sheet presents a low autumn plain — paddy fields after harvest, a scatter of farmhouses, a thin band of distant hills — beneath an enormous sky filled with the high white cumulus clouds of the Japanese autumn, painted in soft graded washes of grey, warm white and slate-blue. The composition gives roughly two thirds of the surface to the sky, in a manner that recalls the British and Dutch watercolourists of the late nineteenth century, and the painting is a deliberate exercise in what Ōshita's own Mizue articles of the following year would call 'the picture of weather' — the rendering of atmospheric mood as the primary subject of landscape watercolour. The handling is delicate, the wash control unusually subtle, and the painting is consistently reproduced in modern surveys of Meiji watercolour as one of the central documents of the genre.