Fishing Village of Akiya

Fishing Village of Akiya (秋谷の漁村, 1905), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, was painted in the same year as the founding of Mizue and shows Ōshita Tōjirō at the height of his middle period. Akiya is a small fishing settlement on the Sagami Bay coast of the Miura peninsula south of Tokyo, much frequented by Tokyo painters and writers in the 1900s for its quiet beaches, low cliffs and views of distant Mount Fuji, and Ōshita's horizontal watercolour records the village in calm afternoon light: a clutch of low fishermen's houses, a few small boats drawn up on the sand, a line of nets drying on the beach, and the wide expanse of Sagami Bay beyond. The palette is dominated by the muted blue-grey of the bay and the warm sand of the beach, with the small accents of figure and net in deeper colour, and the handling shows the looser, more confident brush of Ōshita's mature manner. The painting belongs with the long series of Sagami Bay watercolours that he produced in the 1903–1907 seasons, and exemplifies the working method — direct, on-the-spot, tonally controlled — that he was at that moment teaching, through Suisaiga no shiori and the new magazine Mizue, to the Japanese amateur watercolour public.