A Nude

Held by the Shimane Arts Center (Iwami Art Museum, Grand Toit) in Masuda, A Nude (Ratai, 裸体) of 1889 is among the very earliest of Kuroda Seiki's surviving Paris-period works and one of his first systematic engagements with the academic nude — the foundational subject of European academic painting and the genre whose introduction to Japan he would personally undertake on his return to Tokyo. Painted in his third year of study at the Académie Colarossi under Raphaël Collin, the relatively intimate 80 by 43.8 centimeter canvas documents the disciplined academic life-drawing program that Collin's atelier offered to its Japanese, American, and Scandinavian students. The work prefigures the much more ambitious nude compositions Kuroda would produce in Paris over the next four years — Morning Toilette (Chōshō, 1893), destroyed in World War II but known as the first Western-style nude publicly exhibited in Japan — and the celebrated Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment [triptych](/glossary/triptych) of 1899-1900 that would win a silver medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle. The Shimane example, surviving from the formative middle of Kuroda's Paris years, records the academic foundations on which he would build the entire pedagogical program of the Western Painting Department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts after 1896.