Reclining Nude

Reclining Nude (横たわる裸婦, 1950) is the painting for which Terauchi Manjirō received the Geijutsuin-shō (Imperial Academy of the Arts Prize) in 1950 and is the canonical statement of his mature manner. The full-length figure is laid across the canvas at a long oblique, the head supported on one arm, the body weighed against the heavy red-brown of the studio drapery in a composition whose closest European antecedents are the reclining nudes of Velázquez, Goya and Courbet — although the colour key is denser and lower than any of these, and the drawing more sculpturally insistent. Terauchi has built the figure up in long flat halftones over a warm ochre ground, drawing the contour firmly along the upper edge of the body and modelling the deep flesh-tones in smoke-grey and umber against the muted greens and red-browns of the surrounding cloths. The award marked the official recognition of the figure-painting language he had been refining since the Sekirankai years of the late 1920s; the picture entered the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT) and remains the most widely reproduced of his works, frequently cited in survey histories of post-war Japanese yōga as the painting against which the figural practice of the Nitten generation that followed him was measured.