Evening at Grez

Held in the Kagoshima City Museum of Art, Evening at Grez (Yūgure: Grez, 1902) was painted during Wada Eisaku's residence at the artists' colony of Grez-sur-Loing on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he spent extended periods between 1899 and 1903 on a Ministry of Education scholarship. Grez had been the chosen retreat of Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichirō a generation earlier and was famous to international painters for the long line of its stone bridge over the Loing, the willows along the river bank and the slow, declining evening light that the British painter Frank O'Meara and the Swede Carl Larsson had made canonical in the 1880s. Wada's contribution shows the river in twilight with the heavy mass of the trees on the far bank dissolving into a band of violet and the still surface of the water reflecting the orange remnants of the western sky. The handling is the most fully achieved Japanese application of the Grez evening style, and the painting belongs with the small group of European views — the Grez of Asai Chū, the Belgium of Okada Saburōsuke — through which the Meiji yōga generation absorbed plein-air French painting at first hand. Returned to Wada's birthplace by his family after his death, it is now the centrepiece of the Kagoshima museum's holdings of his work.