Barge Pool 3

Barge Pool 3, the third in a sequence devoted to the same motif, depicts a still stretch of inland water — a canal basin, river backwater, or harbor pool — where flat-bottomed wooden barges lie moored against banks of stone, timber, or earth. The etching medium suits such reflective subjects particularly well: Tanaka could employ horizontal hatching and graduated aquatint to register the calm sheen of water, while the heavier cross-hatched darks of the hulls, mooring posts, and shoreline vegetation press downward into their own mirrored echoes. Fine drypoint or sharply bitten lines pick out the joinery of plank construction and the rope, chain, or bamboo of moorings. The numbered series indicates Tanaka's working method of returning to a single location across multiple plates, recording it in different lights or conditions. Although better known for thatched farmhouses, he gave equal attention throughout his career to other vestiges of pre-modern rural and small-town Japan — water channels, working boats, stone embankments — subjects in which the slow accumulation of human use had left a quiet patina worth preserving in copperplate.