Banks of the Tama River

Banks of the Tama River (多摩川畔, 1907), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, returns to the long horizontal river valley that runs through the western edge of present-day Tokyo metropolis and that Ōshita Tōjirō had painted repeatedly from the early 1900s onward. The watercolour records the wide pebbled bed of the Tama in low summer water, with a few small figures at the river's edge, a stand of riverside willows on the right, and the soft profile of the western Kantō hills against a pale sky. The palette is dominated by the cool blue-greens of the river-side foliage and the warm white-greys of the pebbles, with the sky in a barely tinted wash, and the handling is loose and confident in the mature manner of his late period. The painting belongs with the 1907 cycle of Kantō river landscapes that he produced alongside the Hotaka and Hibara mountain watercolours, and it documents the geographic range of his mature subject matter — from the alpine high peaks of the Northern Japan Alps down to the broad lowland river valleys of the Kantō plain — at the moment of his greatest institutional success, in the year of the first Bunten and the founding of the Japan Watercolour Painting Research Institute.