Portrait of Terajima Munenori

Held by the Tokyo National Museum, Portrait of Terajima Munenori (寺島宗則像, 1900) is one of Kuroda Seiki's most institutionally significant late-Meiji portraits and a key document of his position at the center of the early-twentieth-century Meiji political establishment. The sitter, Viscount Terajima Munenori (1832-1893), was a senior Satsuma Domain statesman of the Bakumatsu and early Meiji period — a physician and rangaku scholar who had travelled to England as a member of the Satsuma student embassy in 1865, served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the early Meiji government, negotiated the recovery of Japanese tariff autonomy, and held a series of cabinet and ambassadorial positions before his death. Kuroda's posthumous portrait, commissioned roughly seven years after Terajima's death, draws on the academic French portrait tradition he had absorbed under Raphaël Collin and translates it to the formal commemorative idiom of the Japanese state. The work belongs to the substantial body of public and private commissions through which Kuroda built the institutional vocabulary of modern Japanese portraiture during his post-1893 Tokyo career, and the Tokyo National Museum example documents his command of the genre that would underpin Japanese yōga portrait practice for the next half-century. The painting is held in the museum's Honkan modern art gallery.