Nude Study II

Among the undated single-figure nudes that document the patient, decades-long studio practice Terauchi Manjirō maintained in his Urawa house in Saitama prefecture, this study presents a half-length female figure in the painter's characteristic register: warm ochre grounds, long sculptural halftones in smoke-grey and umber, and a firmly drawn contour along the shoulder and arm. The compositional formula — a single figure, gently inclined, set in a shallow studio space — is one Terauchi worked over continuously from the late 1920s onward, refining the relationship between figure and ground rather than seeking new motifs. The piece illustrates the figural language that, through the Sekirankai, the Kōfūkai and the post-war Nitten, made him the most influential teacher of figure painting in mid-twentieth-century Japan.