Spring Colors of Koshigaya

Spring Colors of Koshigaya (越ヶ谷の春色, 1897), held in the Iwami Collection of the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is among the earliest of Ōshita Tōjirō's mature watercolours and one of the founding documents of plein-air Japanese landscape watercolour. Painted at the post-station town of Koshigaya north of Tokyo — at that date a quiet rural community on the Nikkō Kaidō about thirty kilometres above the capital, surrounded by paddy fields and the wide flood plain of the Furutone river — the horizontal sheet shows a low, soft view of fields and farmhouses against a pale spring sky, the foreground worked in cool grey-greens and the middle distance in warm ochres, with a few small figures along the embankment. The watercolour belongs to the second year after Ōshita's discovery, in 1893, of the sufficiency of Japanese landscape as subject matter for European watercolour technique, and shows his early manner: tonally compressed, restrained in colour, dependent for its effects on the cool transparent washes that he had learned from Nakamaru Seijūrō and from the 1892 Tokyo exhibition of Alfred Parsons and John Varley Jr. The painting is one of the formative early works of his oeuvre and is consistently reproduced in the standard accounts of his career.