Evening Twilight of Lake Shinji

Evening Twilight of Lake Shinji (宍道湖の黄昏, 1911), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is the last great watercolour of Ōshita Tōjirō's career, painted during the long western journey of the spring and early summer of 1911 from which he would return to Tokyo in failing health and on which he would die in October. Lake Shinji is the brackish coastal lake at Matsue in Shimane prefecture, opening on its eastern end to the Sea of Japan, and famous in Japanese poetry since the Heian period for the dramatic colour of its sunsets across the water. Ōshita's horizontal watercolour records the lake at dusk: a wide, almost still expanse of water carrying the warm reflection of an evening sky in oranges, pinks and warm greys, with a thin band of darker land on the far shore and a few small fishing boats silhouetted against the water. The handling is calm and tonally compressed, the colour deliberately restrained — a single sustained chord of warm tones across the surface, with the cooler greys of the dark shore providing a quiet counterweight. The painting is among the most concentrated and emotionally direct of his late works, and its place at the end of his career — produced months before his early death — has given it a particular weight in modern Japanese reception of the artist, as the closing note of a career that did more than any other to establish watercolour painting in Japan.