The Enthronement Ceremony of Emperor Jimmu

The Enthronement Ceremony of Emperor Jimmu (Jinmu Tennō Goji-i), painted in 1916 and now held in the Kōsetsu Museum of Art at Mikage in Kobe, is Nakamura Fusetsu's principal late-Meiji and Taishō historical canvas devoted to the foundation of the Japanese imperial line. The subject — Jimmu, the great-great-grandson of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, ascending the throne at Kashihara in Yamato on the first day of the lunar new year in 660 BCE, the traditional date of the foundation of the Japanese imperial dynasty — was the foundational episode of imperial myth and had been canonised through state-sponsored painting since the 1870s. Fusetsu's oil shows Jimmu enthroned on a high dais beneath a canopy of feathers and silks, attended by ranks of bowing courtiers and warriors in the eighth-century-derived costume that Meiji historical painting had standardised as 'archaic Japanese,' and treats the scene with the multi-figure grand-machine compositional discipline that he had absorbed from Jean-Paul Laurens. The canvas belongs to the great wave of monumental imperial-historical painting commissioned for the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery and for the Kashihara Shrine reconstruction projects of the Taishō years, and is among the principal examples of Fusetsu's mature historical practice.