Evening Homeward Journey

Evening Homeward Journey (Yūbe no kaeri, 夕べの帰り) is a 1918 painting by Kikuchi Keigetsu, exhibited at the twelfth Bunten and reproduced in the German-language Katalog of contemporary Japanese painting through which much of Keigetsu's interwar work circulated in Europe. The composition shows a peasant or labouring figure returning home at the close of the working day, the subject treated with the quiet dignity that Keigetsu brought to genre painting in his middle years. The handling — soft line, restrained colour, atmospheric ground — is characteristic of the Kyoto nihonga style he inherited from Kikuchi Hōbun and adapted through his early travels and his exposure to late-nineteenth-century European figural painting. The work belongs to a series of contemplative late-Taishō pieces in which Keigetsu replaces the elaborate historical narrative of his early career with simpler, more meditative everyday subjects, and it is one of the works through which his name became familiar to early-twentieth-century European audiences for Japanese painting.