Nude Woman

This oil-on-canvas nude (Japanese title 裸婦, F4 canvas, framed 54.5 by 45.5 cm), preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database, belongs to the long sequence of single-figure female paintings that Terauchi Manjirō worked through during his decades-long Urawa studio practice. The figure is drawn within the painter's characteristic register — warm ochre ground, long flat halftones in smoke-grey and umber, firmly drawn contour along the shoulder and arm — and is closely related in handling to the major Kōfūkai and Nitten nudes by which Terauchi became the most influential figure painter of mid-twentieth-century Japan. Smaller cabinet-scale pictures of this type formed the bulk of his studio output and provided the working-out from which the larger Geijutsuin Prize-winning pictures were drawn; they are now held in private Japanese collections and in regional museums, and through Japanese auction documentation a substantial sample of the working manner survives.