Port Melbourne

Port Melbourne (メルボルン港, 1898), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is the principal surviving watercolour from Ōshita Tōjirō's 1898 Australian journey, painted on the Hobsons Bay waterfront west of central Melbourne where the steamers from Yokohama and Hong Kong put in. The sheet shows the busy port in calm late-afternoon light: a forest of masts and rigging in the middle distance, the long horizontal lines of the wharves and warehouses behind them, and in the foreground a few small boats and figures at the water's edge, the whole rendered in cool washes of grey, blue and umber that pick up the soft southern Australian light. The painting is one of the first significant Australian subjects by a Japanese artist, predating by some years the better-known travel paintings of Yoshida Hiroshi and his contemporaries, and it documents Ōshita's direct exposure to the strong British and Australian watercolour traditions that flourished in late-nineteenth-century Melbourne. The handling is unfussy and tonally restrained in the manner that Ōshita had been developing in his Tokyo watercolours of the previous three years, and the subject — a busy modern port painted with the calm distance of a topographic study — is a characteristic Meiji yōga response to the unfamiliar maritime cities of the British Pacific.