Yuigahama

Held by the Hiratsuka Museum of Art in Kanagawa, Yuigahama (由比ヶ浜) of 1897 is a coastal landscape painted during the same celebrated summer that produced Lakeside and A Warm Day, and depicts the long stretch of Pacific beach below the medieval capital of Kamakura that gives the painting its name. The composition translates Kuroda Seiki's French plein-air training into the open horizontal subject of a Japanese strand — sand, the slow line of the surf, a low horizon line and an atmospheric sky — and develops the relationship between figure and ground with the broadly worked brushwork and restrained chromatic palette that characterize his post-Hakubakai mature manner. The painting belongs to the small body of Sagami Bay and Hakone landscapes that Kuroda produced in the late 1890s during summer residencies away from Tokyo, works in which he applied to indigenous coastal and lakeside subjects the bright outdoor color he had absorbed in Grez-sur-Loing. The Hiratsuka Museum example, near the actual site of Yuigahama, documents the landscape side of the Hakubakai program — Kuroda's translation of the French plein-air manner into a recognizably Japanese topographic idiom — and complements the figure painting for which he is more commonly remembered.