Nude Study III

This undated nude study illustrates the settled, slow-paced studio practice through which Terauchi Manjirō worked his way through more than three decades of single-figure female paintings. The half-length figure is shown against a quiet ground, the body modelled in long flat halftones in smoke-grey and umber over a warm ochre underpainting, the contour drawn firmly along the curve of the shoulder and arm. The compositional register and the colour key are continuous with the major nudes — Nude (1947), Reclining Nude (1950), Nude (1963) — through which Terauchi rose to the Imperial Academy of the Arts Prize and to full Academy membership; the study belongs to the great body of working-out paintings on which the larger statements were built and which collectively define the figural manner that the painter taught to his Musashino Association pupils and to the cohort of Tokyo School of Fine Arts and Tokyo University of Education graduates who carried his practice forward into the late twentieth century.