Evening at the Ferry Crossing

Held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts and now designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan, Evening at the Ferry Crossing (Watō no yūgure, 1897) is Wada Eisaku's graduation work from the Western painting department of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and was completed at the age of twenty-two. The large horizontal oil (approximately 126.6 by 189.3 cm) depicts a peasant woman with a basket and her companions waiting at a country ferry crossing under a low evening sky, the bare line of the river bank running across the canvas's lower third and the silhouettes of the figures softening into the violet-grey atmosphere of the dusk. The handling is the most fully achieved Japanese application of the plein-air gaiyō manner that Kuroda Seiki had brought back from his nine years in Paris under Raphaël Collin, but Wada has lowered the key and replaced Kuroda's bright accents with the muted tonal harmonies that he had learned from copies and reproductions of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon school. The painting was awarded the Hakubakai's highest prize at its September 1897 exhibition and established Wada at the head of his generation; together with Kuroda Seiki's Lakeside (1897) it is one of the two foundational oils of late-Meiji yōga and remains the work by which the first decade of systematic oil painting instruction in Japan is most often represented.