Ōme

Ōme (青梅, 1904), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is a vertical-format watercolour of the small Tama valley town of Ōme, in the western edge of present-day Tokyo metropolis, where the Tama river emerges from the mountains and where Ōshita Tōjirō painted repeatedly through the early 1900s. The sheet is unusual in its tall portrait orientation — most of his mature landscape watercolours are horizontal — and uses the vertical format to carry a steep mountain slope on the right and the curve of a roof and a few low buildings at the bottom, with a slip of pale river in the middle distance. The palette is dominated by the cool blue-greens of the Tama riverine landscape in early spring, with warm ochres in the foreground earth and the slate-grey of village roofs, and the handling is freer than in the more restrained landscapes of the late 1890s, with looser washes and more confident brushwork. The painting belongs to the cluster of Tama-valley watercolours that Ōshita produced in the 1904 sketching seasons leading up to the 1905 founding of Mizue, and is a representative example of his developing mature manner — the manner that would dominate the watercolour section of his Pacific Painting Association exhibitions through the late 1900s.