Girl Reading a Newspaper

Held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, Girl Reading a Newspaper (Shinbun o yomu shōjo, 1897) is among the small figure studies that Wada Eisaku produced during his graduation year at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts alongside the monumental Evening at the Ferry Crossing. The intimate vertical canvas shows a young Japanese woman seated at a desk in Western dress, her head bent forward over a folded newspaper held in her lap, the lamp-lit yellow ground of the paper rising against the cool grey-blue of her kimono jacket. The subject matter is characteristic of the late-Meiji yōga interest in scenes of modern domestic life — the woman absorbed in the daily Tokyo press is a small visual emblem of the Meiji programme of bunmei kaika (civilisation and enlightenment) — and the handling is direct, untheatrical and tonal in the manner of the Hakubakai's plein-air orthodoxy. Painted at the same moment as the artist's celebrated graduation landscape, the work documents the breadth of subject matter through which the first cohort of Tokyo-trained oil painters tested the new medium against modern urban subjects.