Ratai (Seated Nude)

Ratai (Seated Nude), an oil on canvas of approximately 99.8 by 79.7 cm painted between 1903 and 1905 and now held in the Shimane Prefectural Iwami Art Museum, is the principal life-study from Nakamura Fusetsu's Paris years. The canvas shows a three-quarter-length seated nude figure modelled in the firmly contoured, low-keyed academic manner of Jean-Paul Laurens, with the cool studio light raking across the figure's shoulders and the heavy fall of shadow describing the back's musculature in the careful sculptural modelling that Fusetsu had absorbed during his four years at the Académie Julian. The painting was produced during the period in which the Académie's life-class was for the Japanese yōga generation an experience without precedent at home — the systematic study of the nude figure remained nearly impossible in Tokyo before the founding of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts's Western painting department — and Ratai together with the contemporary Rafu-ritsuzō constitutes the foundational record of Fusetsu's encounter with the Parisian academic tradition. The painting subsequently entered the Iwami Art Museum collection at Masuda in Shimane prefecture, where it is preserved as one of the principal early-twentieth-century academic nudes in a Japanese public collection.