We are looking southeast over Sensuka Bay from the great stone wharf at Orepi. It is very early morning, and the first sun’s rays have just caught the facades of the eastward-facing buildings on the right side of the print. Although much of the port is still shrouded in shadows, it is already bustling with activity. Dock workers are rolling heavy barrels towards a sailboat and unloading huge bales of spices from a ship, merchants are negotiating prices, sailors are caulking a hull, a fisherman is repairing a net, and a loan shark is giving instructions to his collector from inside a covered sedan chair. Sidling along the wall of a grog tavern on the left side of the image, a prostitute is making her way back home.

The artist’s wonderment at the beauty of the scene is quite evident. Contrary to most of the other prints in the series, the effects of light and shadow have been recorded in great detail. Several early morning visits to the location must have been necessary in order for the artist to accurately set down all of the nuances of this ephemeral moment just after the sun has crested the horizon.

It seems likely that this image, as with the view of the Lovers’ Bridge (See n. 2), contains a self-portrait of the artist. This would be the figure in the right-hand corner seated next to what appear to be some charcoals and a sheaf of paper. The man has cast his drawing instruments aside, and holds his arms outstretched before him. His fingers are extended in a grasping gesture, almost as though he were trying to grab hold of all the morning’s magnificence spread out before him.

This pose may be intended to be read as an expression of the artist’s frustration at the elusive nature of beauty. Such an elusiveness is indeed a central concept of Sensukan aesthetics. According to many of the most influential Sensukan aestheticians, there is always in our appreciation of a beauty a concomitant desire to possess it somehow. Faced with a beautiful thing, we wish to bring it into ourselves, or to become a part of it, in a way that, we sooner or later realize, is ultimately impossible. Even if we concentrate all of our admiration and attention on one small part of it, it is as though the essence of that beauty will then automatically be displaced elsewhere, into another part, or into a memory that it conjures up, or the memory of a memory.

More than most people, artists may delude themselves for a moment into believing they have caught hold of that beauty, setting it down forever in ink or paint. Even in these rare instances, the Sensukan aestheticians would point out, the victory will nevertheless prove a hollow one. If the artists have succeeded at all, it will be only in the rather pitiful objective of signalling to their fellow humans that they too have experienced that aching, nameless longing in the face of beauty, that all this loveliness was not lost on them (even as everything, everything is lost on them, and on all of us). As for that which they have actually created (in this best-case scenario), it will be just another beautiful thing from which they are separate. They will remain, as before, outside observers of beauty, rather than living participants in it.

If the fleeting majesty of this harbour morning can belong to anyone, it is perhaps only to the longshoremen, the stevedores, the shipwrights and seamen, their dark silhouettes and bent-over backs gilded by the morning sun, wholly at one with all that beauty in the moment in which they are too occupied with the task at hand to pay it any notice.