Gekka no rafu (Nude under the Moon)

Held in the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Yamamoto Hōsui's Gekka no rafu (月下の裸婦, Nude under the Moon, c. 1882-86) is among the most ambitious of the academic life paintings the artist produced during his Paris decade and one of the principal documents of the early-Meiji encounter with the European tradition of the female nude. The horizontal oil on canvas (82 × 120 cm) shows a reclining nude figure illuminated by moonlight against a dark wooded background, a subject drawn straight from the Salon mythological repertoire of the 1880s and treated with the smooth, polished surface and sculptural figure-modelling Hōsui had absorbed from Gérôme. The painting is a companion piece to the earlier, more austere Rafu (1880, Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu) in the conscious project that defined Hōsui's later Paris years — to absorb the central genre of European academic painting and bring it back to a Japan where the very subject had no domestic precedent. Together with the 1892 Jūnishi zodiac cycle and the 1895 Urashima-zu, it is one of the cornerstones of his oeuvre and a foundational document of yōga's first generation.