Nikkō

Nikkō (日光, 1897), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, records the famous mountain shrine town in the Tochigi prefecture mountains 140 kilometres north of Tokyo that Ōshita Tōjirō visited on his major Tōhoku sketching tour of the year. Nikkō had been a religious centre since the eighth century and the dynastic shrine of the Tokugawa shoguns since the seventeenth, and it was already, by 1897, one of the first destinations of Western tourists in the new Meiji Japan; the railway from Ueno to Nikkō had been opened in 1890, and the cedar-lined approach roads and the steep cryptomeria forests around the Tōshōgū were rapidly becoming the standard images of Japanese mountain landscape in the Western imagination. Ōshita's watercolour treats the site not through the architectural famous-place tradition of the late-Edo print, but as a landscape of cool dark forest and pale mountain water, in the manner of the British watercolourists whose Tokyo exhibition had impressed him five years earlier. The handling is calm, the palette restricted to cool greens, dull blues and silver-greys, and the painting belongs with the founding works of the modern Japanese watercolour tradition's engagement with the mountain landscape of the country.