Remaining Snow of Mount Hotaka

Remaining Snow of Mount Hotaka (穂高山の残雪, 1907), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is one of Ōshita Tōjirō's most ambitious mountain watercolours, painted from the foothills of the Hotaka peaks in the Northern Japan Alps of present-day Nagano prefecture. Mount Hotaka — at 3190 metres the third-highest peak in Japan — had only recently been opened to artists and climbers by the developing infrastructure of Kamikōchi and the Azusa valley, and Ōshita's expedition there in the summer of 1907 was one of the early Tokyo artistic visits to the area; the watercolour shows the dramatic high peaks rising against a cool grey-blue sky, the white pockets of unmelted summer snow worked in transparent reserve against the warmer rock greys and earth tones of the foothills. The composition is unusually vertical in its emphasis, with the high mountain mass dominating the upper two thirds of the sheet, and the painting was shown alongside the larger landscape Hotaka-san no fumoto ('The Foothills of Mount Hotaka') at the first Bunten in the autumn of 1907 — the inaugural exhibition of the official Ministry of Education salon. The Hotaka cycle of 1907 fixed Ōshita's standing as the senior Japanese watercolourist of the high mountain landscape and as a founding figure of Japanese alpine painting.