Manjirō Terauchi

Terauchi Manjirō (寺内萬治郎, 25 November 1890 – 14 December 1964) was one of the most accomplished yōga (Western-style) painters of the Taishō and Shōwa periods, and is universally remembered as the great twentieth-century painter of the female nude in Japan. Across a career of nearly half a century he produced a body of figure paintings whose volumetric solidity, low-keyed ochre and umber palette and almost devotional patience of observation distinguished him sharply from the brighter plein-air manner of his teachers and made him, in the period after 1945, the model against whom most subsequent Japanese painters of the figure were measured.

Terauchi was born in Osaka into a merchant family and showed an early talent for drawing. After completing his secondary education he moved to Tokyo and entered the Western-painting (yōga) division of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tōkyō Bijutsu Gakkō, now Tokyo University of the Arts), then dominated by Kuroda Seiki (1866-1924), the founder of the Hakubakai (White Horse Society) and of the gaiyō (bright-palette) academic manner that Kuroda had brought back from his Paris years with Raphaël Collin. Terauchi graduated in 1916 and almost at once began to show in the official state exhibitions: his first acceptance at the Bunten (Ministry of Education annual) came in 1918, and the following year he was named a juror of the successor Teiten — an unusually early recognition for a painter who was still in his twenties. From this point on the Bunten/Teiten/Shin-Bunten/Nitten system would be the principal arena of his career, and he would remain one of its central yōga figures until his death.

The Tokyo art world of the 1920s was riven between the bright Kuroda academicism, which was already being criticised as decorative, and a number of more rigorously volumetric reactions to it. In 1926, with the painter Suzuki Shintarō and a small circle of like-minded colleagues, Terauchi co-founded the Sekirankai (赤瀾会, often translated as the 'Pomegranate Society' after the literal sense of the characters), a study and exhibition group dedicated to a denser, more sculptural figure painting drawn from the example of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Courbet and Cézanne. In 1929 he joined the Kōfūkai (光風会), the leading independent yōga society founded by former Hakubakai members in 1912, where he became a senior figure and exhibited the major nudes that would define his later reputation. The Kōfūkai association proved decisive: it linked Terauchi to a generation of Tokyo-school yōga painters — Wada Eisaku, Fujishima Takeji, Okada Saburōsuke, Nakazawa Hiromitsu — and gave him a permanent national exhibition platform outside the contested official salon.

In the late 1920s Terauchi moved his household and studio to Urawa in Saitama prefecture, north of Tokyo, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. Urawa in the inter-war years was becoming a colony of Tokyo painters who sought a quieter setting within commuting distance of the city, and Terauchi's presence helped concentrate it: the city's surviving Urawa Art Museum (Urawa-shi Bijutsukan) preserves a substantial body of work by him and his circle. During the 1930s his work matured in the direction that would become his signature manner — single-figure female nudes, often shown in reverie or repose in a shallow studio space, modelled in long, smoke-coloured halftones over a warm ground, with the contour drawn firmly but never harshly and the flesh weighed against muted ochres, mossy greens and the deep red-browns of textiles, cushions or studio drapery. Yukata (Girl in Bath Robe, 1935) is among the early paintings in this vein, transposing the same physiognomic concentration onto a clothed figure.