Napoléon (after Paul Delaroche)

Held in the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum and dating to the last years of Kawakami Tōgai's life (probably 1879–1881), Napoléon is a faithful watercolour copy after the upper half of Paul Delaroche's celebrated 1845 oil Napoleon at Fontainebleau, the brooding seated portrait of the deposed emperor that Delaroche painted at the height of his European reputation and that became one of the most reproduced images of nineteenth-century French history painting. The work is executed in watercolour on paper at approximately 60 by 58 centimetres, with Tōgai concentrating his attention on the head, the high collar, the green of the chasseur jacket and the heavy chair-back, and omitting Delaroche's full-length composition below the sitter's waist.

The painting is the most legible surviving document of Tōgai's working method as the senior yōga teacher of his generation: the Bansho Shirabesho and its successor institutions had no European originals to study, only the reproductive engravings, photographs and chromolithographs that circulated through the Yokohama trade and through diplomatic channels. Tōgai's pupils were taught to copy these reproductions as exercises in the management of light, of skin tone, of the heavy academic palette that none of them had ever seen in oil; the Napoléon is one such exercise, executed by the master himself in the medium — watercolour — that he had most fully mastered. The choice of a Napoleonic subject is itself characteristic of the early Meiji period, when the figure of Napoleon was widely celebrated by Japanese reformers as a model of decisive self-made authority.