Old Woman

Held in the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOMAT), Old Woman (Ōna, 1908) is among the most concentrated character studies that Wada Eisaku produced in the years immediately following his return from Paris and his appointment to the faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The canvas depicts an elderly Japanese woman seated against a neutral ground, her body slightly turned and her hands resting in her lap, her white hair drawn back in the simple manner of the late-Meiji rural elderly and her deeply lined face modelled in the warm tonal manner Wada had learned at the Académie Colarossi under Raphaël Collin. The choice of an unidealised peasant sitter as the subject of a major exhibition canvas was characteristic of the period: Aoki Shigeru's mother portraits, Kuroda Seiki's late peasant studies and Okada Saburōsuke's portraits of Kyoto matrons all belong to the same impulse to use the Western academic portrait formula for an unflinching record of the aged faces of Meiji Japan. The painting was shown at the 1908 second Bunten, where Wada was already serving as juror of the Western painting section, and it has long been understood as one of the foundational images through which Japanese oil painting found a distinctively local subject for the inherited European technique.