Autumn at Lake Hibara

Autumn at Lake Hibara (檜原湖の秋, 1907), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is one of the best-known of Ōshita Tōjirō's late-career mountain landscapes and one of the principal documents of the late-Meiji discovery of the Bandai region by Tokyo painters. Lake Hibara had been formed in 1888 by the catastrophic eruption of Mount Bandai, which had dammed the Nagase river and created a long, irregular alpine lake of striking beauty in the mountains of present-day Fukushima prefecture; by the mid-1900s the area was the subject of intense artistic interest as the newest of Japan's great inland-water landscapes. Ōshita's horizontal watercolour shows the lake in autumn, framed by mountain slopes whose foliage is rendered in the warm yellows and rusts of the Tōhoku autumn, with the still water of the lake carrying a quiet horizontal reflection of the mountains and sky. The palette is rich but tonally controlled, the brushwork relaxed and confident, and the painting belongs to the small group of late watercolours — together with the Mount Hotaka landscapes of the same year — that fixed Ōshita's reputation as the foremost watercolour painter of the Japanese mountains.