Exhibited
Second Teikoku Bijutsuin Bijutsu Tenrankai (Teiten Exhibition), Takenodai Gallery, Ueno Park, Tokyo, October 16–November 22, 1920

Published
Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai (Nittenshi Editorial Committee), Nittenshi 6 (History of the National Salon 6), Teiten hen 3 (The Teiten Exhibition 3), Tokyo, Nitten, 1982, pp. 160, 172 (no. 34)

One must acknowledge that among the works on display were several that embodied a mode of expression whose artistic significance had not previously been encountered at the Bunten exhibitions. In a painting titled Fukakusa, for example, one sensed an atmosphere evocative of the place itself; in a work entitled Early Spring, the distinctive sentiments of the season were rendered with persuasive immediacy.

Although these remarks were written by the leading painter and influential exhibition judge Takeuchi Seihō in response to another depiction of Fukakusa shown by Dōmoto Inshō at the First Teiten Exhibition of 1919, his perceptive assessment neatly captures the profound transformations then underway in the world of Nihonga (neo‑nativist painting). Seihō went on to observe that:

Works that seem to have been forced into being through an accumulation of overbearing, self‑conscious effort; paintings that rely solely on abstract conception, displaying not the slightest spark of individual character; and pictures that are merely large and expansive in scale yet utterly impoverished in content … have markedly decreased.

This newly rediscovered pair of folding screens by Ōta Shūmin—the artist’s third submission to Japan’s annual national salon—firmly establishes him as a leading figure within the new wave identified by Seihō. Drawing upon inherited styles and techniques associated with the Rinpa tradition (founded in the seventeenth century) including brilliant mineral pigments, flattened decorative patterning, and tarashikomi (the wet‑on‑wet pooling of pigments), Shūmin also introduces a distinctly modern sensibility. His composition incorporates a Westernizing sense of pictorial depth and a vivid realism in its historic portrayal of a wet afternoon in Fukakusa, an area south of Kyoto, Japan’s former imperial capital. Evergreen pines, their rain‑darkened lower branches hanging nearly to the ground, and birch trees entwined with climbing vines tinged with russet autumn foliage frame the scene, along with a rustic wooden irrigation channel at the far right. At the center stands an anagama ceramic kiln, seemingly just cooled and opened after its long, arduous firing. Several large stoneware kame or tsubo (storage jars) have already been removed, suggesting the quiet aftermath of sustained labor.

To the left of the kiln sits a figure wearing an eboshi court cap, his unadorned clothing identifying him not as a courtier but rather as a servant or retainer. It seems unlikely that such a figure is intended to represent an artisan potter; instead, he may be understood as a visitor, pausing to savor the natural beauty of a region long celebrated for its picturesque fields, bamboo groves, and scattered hamlets. Fukakusa has been known since early times as a center for ceramic tile production—including roof tiles for Momoyama Castle—although there is scant evidence that large‑scale ceramic vessels were ever manufactured there.

Ōta Shūmin was born in Fukushima City in northern Honshū under the given names Shigeru or Masusaburō. After graduating from middle school, he entered the Japanese Painting Department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1904, where he studied under Araki Kanpō, an artist of the highest rank. His earliest recorded work, Tōbijin (“Chinese Belle”), was exhibited at the First Exhibition of the Dokugakai in October 1905. He was first selected for inclusion in the Eleventh Bunten Exhibition in 1917 and continued to exhibit regularly at the Bunten and its successor iterations until 1945. In 1931 he was awarded a Recommendation Prize at the Twelfth Teiten, which also granted him exemption from the jury process. In 1924, Shūmin traveled to China as a committee member of the Japan-China Joint Painting Exhibition. Evacuated to his native Fukushima in 1945, he later served as a juror for the First through Third Fukushima Prefectural Art Exhibitions. He died in 1950 at the age of 69.