Nude (1963)

Nude (裸婦, 1963), made in the last full year of Terauchi Manjirō's life, is among the latest works in the sequence of single-figure female nudes that he had pursued continuously since the 1930s. The painting is small in scale and concentrated in handling — a half-length figure seen in three-quarter view, the head turned slightly down, the modelling carried in the long smoke-coloured halftones and warm ochre grounds that had become his settled language. By 1963 Terauchi had been a full member of the Imperial Academy of the Arts for three years and was widely regarded, through his Musashino Association pupils and his teaching at Tokyo University of Education and Niigata University, as the senior figure painter of the Nitten establishment. The picture shows no break with the manner of the 1947 and 1950 nudes that had established that authority; instead it carries forward, with the characteristic patience of an artist who had been looking at this same problem for forty years, the project of constructing a Japanese figure painting whose dignity and weight could bear sustained comparison with the European masters of the nude.