Seascape, Mera

This work was created at Mera, at the southern edge of Tateyama in Chiba Prefecture. Aoki visited the area in July of 1904, spending about six weeks there with Sakamoto Hanjiro and two friends. The wild seas and the landforms at Mera, which call to mind a romanticism redolent of ancient times, delighted Aoki, who produced a number of works, including A Good Catch, with the Mera seacoast as their setting. He expressed his excitement about the location in a letter to a friend: "The Awa Shrine is nearby; it is an imperial shrine dedicated to Amenotomi-no-mikoto. In any case, on this cape, battered by the Kuroshio Current, must be buried shards of human history lost in the distant past." In this work, Aoki makes effective use of pointillism as a technique for rendering the rocks and breaking whitecaps in the blazing summer sun.