Battle of Tsushima (Russo-Japanese War: Naval Battle in the Sea of Japan)

Battle of Tsushima (Nichiro-eki Nihonkai Kaisen), the great mural commissioned in 1905 from Nakamura Fusetsu by the Nippon Yūsen steamship company and now installed in the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) in the Outer Gardens of the Meiji Shrine, depicts the decisive engagement of 27-28 May 1905 in which the Japanese Combined Fleet under Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō annihilated the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Tsushima Strait between Kyushu and Korea. The mural shows the battleship Mikasa, Tōgō's flagship, in the foreground at the moment of the famous executed 'Tōgō Turn' (the U-turn manoeuvre across the Russian line that secured the battle), with the Russian squadron strung out in the middle distance and a sky of grey-mauve cloud and gun-smoke rising behind the masts. Painted on Fusetsu's return from Paris and reflecting both Laurens's grand-machine tradition and the contemporary European war-painting of artists such as Édouard Detaille, the canvas is among the principal Japanese paintings of the Russo-Japanese War and one of the foundational works of the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery, the state cycle of eighty oil and Japanese-style paintings commissioned between 1912 and 1936 to commemorate the life of the Meiji Emperor and the wars of his reign.