Portrait of Madame Sitter

Painted in 1903, Portrait of Madame Sitter (Madamu Shitteru zō) is the most ambitious of the European portraits that Wada Eisaku produced at the close of his four-year Paris sojourn at the Académie Colarossi under Raphaël Collin, and it was the work with which he announced his return from Europe at the spring 1903 Hakubakai exhibition in Tokyo. The half-length canvas depicts a fashionable Western matron — identified in the original Tokyo catalogue only as 'Madame Sitter' and now generally understood to have been a Paris acquaintance — seated against a dark ground in a high-collared black dress, her face modelled in the warm tonal handling that Wada had learned from Collin and her gaze turned slightly toward the viewer. The portrait belongs to the brief group of European sitter portraits — Kuroda Seiki's Reading (1891), Okada Saburōsuke's French Girl (1898) — through which the Meiji yōga generation tested its mastery of academic figure painting against European subjects, and it served on Wada's return as the credential that secured his appointment to the faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and that established him as the leading portraitist of his generation. The half-length portrait against a neutral dark ground would remain the formula of his many institutional portraits of Meiji statesmen and university chancellors for the next four decades.