Thoughts of Home (Portrait of a Japanese Lady)

Held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, Thoughts of Home (Shikyō: Nihon fujin no shōzō, 1902) was painted during the second half of Wada Eisaku's four-year Paris sojourn at the Académie Colarossi under Raphaël Collin. The intimate canvas depicts a young Japanese woman in kimono seated in profile against a softly modulated dark ground, her gaze turned to the side and her hands folded in her lap. Wada had paid for a Japanese model to sit for him in his Paris studio, and the painting belongs to the small but significant body of Meiji yōga in which Japanese painters trained abroad produced their first images of Japanese subjects in Western academic technique. The handling is darker and tonally tighter than the Grez landscapes of the same year, drawing on Whistlerian and late-Symbolist precedent in its concentration on a single figure against a near-monochrome ground, and the title's deliberate ambiguity — whether 'thoughts of home' belongs to the sitter or to the painter — has been read since its first showing as an emblem of the divided consciousness of the Meiji yōga generation in Paris. Returned with Wada to Tokyo in 1903, it has long been one of the centrepieces of the Geidai collection of the Hakubakai painters.