Reading

Held in the Ishibashi Foundation Collection at the Ishibashi Museum of Art in Kurume, Reading (Dokusho, 1902) is among the intimate Paris-period figure paintings that Wada Eisaku produced during his four-year Ministry of Education scholarship at the Académie Colarossi under Raphaël Collin. The small vertical canvas depicts a young Western woman in profile, seated and bent forward in close concentration over a book held in her lap, with the lamplight modelling her brow and the white page rising warm against the otherwise low-keyed ground. The subject of the absorbed reader was a fixture of late-nineteenth-century French and Belgian intimisme — Vuillard, Khnopff and the English New English Art Club painters had made it a defining theme of fin-de-siècle interior painting — and Wada's contribution shows how completely he had absorbed the manner during his Paris years. Acquired by Ishibashi Shōjirō, the Bridgestone founder whose patronage from the 1930s onward built the great private collection of Meiji oil painting now divided between the Ishibashi Museum of Art in Kurume and the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, the painting is a foundational document of the Paris-trained branch of late-Meiji yōga.