A Stroll

Held by the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts (the Geidai Museum, successor institution to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts where Fujishima taught for nearly four decades), A Stroll (1897) is one of the earliest surviving paintings from Fujishima's first years on the school's Western Painting faculty. Painted shortly after Kuroda Seiki recalled him to Tokyo in 1896 to join the newly established yōga department, A Stroll documents the immediate impact of the bright, outdoor-light painting that Kuroda had brought back from Paris and was actively promoting through the recently founded Hakubakai (White Horse Society). The composition places a single female figure in a landscape setting and develops the relationship between figure and ground with the loosened brushwork and high-keyed color characteristic of Meiji plein-air painting, a self-conscious departure from the darker tonal palette that the older Meiji Bijutsukai had inherited from earlier nineteenth-century academic practice. The painting belongs to the Geidai Museum's foundational collection of works by the school's first generation of yōga teachers, a group that included Kuroda himself, Kume Keiichirō, Okada Saburōsuke, and Fujishima, whose collective production in the late 1890s constructed the institutional core of modern Japanese oil painting. As a record of Fujishima's pre-European style — before his five years in Paris and Rome between 1905 and 1910 would transform his portrait and landscape practice — A Stroll documents the lyrical, broadly worked Hakubakai manner that would feed into the romantic compositions of his early-twentieth-century mature work.