Nude Study V

This undated nude study, the smallest of the sequence of figure paintings preserved in the Terauchi Manjirō catalogue at Wikimedia Commons, exemplifies the painter's lifelong concentration on the female nude as a vehicle for the slow working-out of relationships of mass, contour and atmosphere. Drawn within the settled studio formula — warm ochre ground, long flat halftones in smoke-grey and umber, firmly drawn contour, muted browns and greens in the surround — the picture extends the figural language that Terauchi had begun to develop with the Sekirankai in 1926 and that was honoured with the Imperial Academy of the Arts Prize in 1950 and Academy membership in 1960. It belongs to the great body of small studio works through which the painter sustained, between his major Nitten and Kōfūkai exhibition pieces, the patient observational practice on which his entire mature manner depended.