A Warm Day

Held by the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, A Warm Day (Atatakaki Hi, 暖き日) of 1897 belongs to the same crucial summer that produced Lakeside and demonstrates the parallel direction of Kuroda Seiki's mature plein-air manner. Painted shortly after Kuroda's 1893 return from Paris and his 1896 founding of the Hakubakai and appointment to head the Western Painting Department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, the composition develops the bright, high-keyed naturalism that he had absorbed in Raphaël Collin's atelier and at the Grez-sur-Loing artists' colony south of Fontainebleau. The painting works in the broad, loosely brushed manner that distinguished the Hakubakai (White Horse Society) circle from the darker, more academically tonal style of the older Meiji Bijutsukai, and it documents the chromatic vocabulary — silvery sunlight, atmospheric haze, broken color in the foliage — that Kuroda was actively teaching to the first generation of his Tokyo School of Fine Arts students. The Aichi Prefectural Museum example is one of a small group of Kuroda paintings outside the Kuroda Memorial Hall and Tokyo National Museum collections, and it documents the lyrical plein-air program that, more than any other body of work, defined the institutional core of Meiji yōga.