Yukata (Girl in Bath Robe)

Yukata (浴衣, 1935) is among the earliest paintings of Terauchi Manjirō's mature manner and one of the very few in which his characteristic single-figure composition is given a clothed subject. The young woman is shown three-quarter length in a striped summer cotton yukata, the loose robe falling open along the front edge to disclose the round of one shoulder; her hair is gathered loosely, the head inclined, and the eyes are dropped in the inward, almost meditative concentration that runs through all of Terauchi's figure paintings from this date forward. The picture is built across a narrow range of warm browns, smoke-greys and the pale slate-blue of the yukata stripe, with the textile rendered in firm but supple brushstrokes that already display the long, sculptural halftones for which the post-war nudes would become known. By 1935 Terauchi had been a Kōfūkai exhibitor for six years and had settled in Urawa in Saitama prefecture; the painting belongs to the working out, in a clothed register, of the figural language he had begun to develop in the Sekirankai years of the late 1920s and that would dominate his work through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.