Kaigan no Sanninmusume (Three Girls on the Beach)

Kaigan no Sanninmusume (Three Girls on the Beach), painted in 1939 and held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), is among the principal late paintings of Nakamura Fusetsu's seventy-third year and a return in his Shōwa maturity to the seaside genre subject that had attracted Meiji yōga since Aoki Shigeru's celebrated A Gift of the Sea of 1904. The oil shows three young women standing barefoot at the edge of the surf on a clouded summer day, their kimono lifted to mid-calf and their hair caught back, in a horizontal composition that places the figures slightly off-centre against the great horizontal band of the open Pacific. The handling is more loosely brushed and higher-keyed than in Fusetsu's earlier history paintings, reflecting the relaxation of his late style and the influence of the lyrical seaside paintings then being produced by the younger generation of MOMAT-collected yōga; the painting was acquired by the museum in the post-war reorganisation of the imperial collections and remains among the principal examples of Fusetsu's late work in a Tokyo public collection. The work documents the continuity of the academic figure tradition Fusetsu had established forty years earlier in the Paris life-class and brought, by 1939, to a quieter and more elegiac late maturity.