VERO BEACH — Water has long served as both a natural force and a source of artistic inspiration. At the Vero Beach Museum of Art, an upcoming lecture will explore how artists in Japan, France and the United States interpreted water during a century of significant changes in transportation and international travel.
The lecture, led by Professor Noriko Murai, is part of the exhibition “Hokusai Hiroshige Hasui: Japanese Landscapes in Print,” which examines Japanese landscape prints and their place in a broader artistic tradition.
As steamship travel expanded during the 19th century, opportunities for international exchange grew, although access to those experiences varied. Murai said that divide offers an important perspective on how people encountered other cultures.
“Whether you actually did go on this long journey that involved steamship travel or not, whether you're French, American, or Japanese, or any other nationality, I think there was a diverging class of people who engaged in that kind of international travel and those who did not,” she said.
Advances in transportation also influenced how artists experienced the natural world. In East Asian landscape traditions, Murai sees water as an essential element rather than simply a feature of the scenery.
“But what is very distinctive about East Asian landscape tradition, one that originated in China, is in fact, it is more than a landscape. The idea of nature needs to have both earth or land component and water component. So I think in that sense also, it really widened the way I think artists can experience nature,” she said.
Water also offered a way to consider the relationship between connection and separation, a theme Murai sees reflected in the evolution of modern art.
“I think water seems fascinating because it's one that connects and separates things. And that intersection of disruption but continuity as a very abstracted theme is something that I think we see in paintings as it became modernized,” she said.
American artist John La Farge offers one example of how travel could shape an artist's relationship with water. La Farge visited Japan, where the experience became a significant source of inspiration for his work.
Murai said water provided a tangible way for artists to retain memories of places they had visited, linking their physical experiences with their artistic interpretations.
“I think for artists like him, it was a element that was both natural but man-made at the same time. It was element that you could touch, that you could see, that you could hear. So this kind of multi-sensor experience, a lot of those immersive experience of going to different place and remembering Japan somehow for him crystallized in this water element,” she said.
La Farge also studied the work of Katsushika Hokusai, the Japanese artist known for the woodblock print “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” commonly called “The Great Wave.”
The print depicts a towering wave above fishing boats, with Mount Fuji visible in the background. Although the wave has become one of the most recognizable images in Japanese art internationally, Murai said its reception in Japan offers a different perspective on what viewers value in the composition.
“The appeal of this prints in Japan remains Mount Fuji, not the Great Wave,” she said. “So what does that say about those of us who are fascinated by the Great Wave? I think it has something to do with the universal imagery of the Great Wave that transcends that place specificity of Japan or the time specificity of mid-19th century.”
The contrast highlights how cultural background can influence the way audiences interpret the same work of art. Murai hopes the exhibition and lecture will encourage visitors to reconsider familiar images and recognize the history behind the works on display.
She also sees the exhibition as an opportunity to reflect on the journeys that brought artworks across countries and generations, particularly as modern transportation has changed how people experience travel.
“I think this is an opportunity for us to remind ourselves and appreciate that we are fortunate enough to hold in front of us various objects that has traveled through time and space and specific to this exhibition and my lecture, the role that travel by water, the impact that it had on us moving from one place to another in a way that you cannot really relate to anymore,” she said.
Murai’s lecture begins at 4:30 p.m. Nov. 30 at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The exhibition, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, runs from Nov. 21 through Feb. 7.