Portrait of Fukuchi Genichirō

Held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Yamamoto Hōsui's Portrait of Fukuchi Genichirō (福地源一郎像, Fukuchi Genichirō no shōzō, c. 1876-77) is among the earliest mature oil portraits of his career, painted during his Tokyo years immediately before his 1878 departure for Paris. The compact oil on canvas (55 × 42.8 cm) depicts the celebrated Meiji journalist, dramatist and politician Fukuchi Gen'ichirō (1841-1906) — editor-in-chief of the Tōkyō Nichi Nichi Shimbun, founder of the Kabuki-za theatre, and one of the most influential cultural figures of the early Meiji decades. Painted in the firm, low-keyed manner Hōsui had learned from his teacher Goseda Hōryū and from Antonio Fontanesi at the Technical Art School, the portrait records the appearance of one of Meiji Japan's leading public intellectuals at the moment at which photography and oil portraiture were jointly displacing the woodblock likeness as the dominant medium for elite portraiture. As a transitional work poised between Hōsui's domestic apprenticeship and his subsequent academic training in Paris, the painting occupies a distinctive place in his oeuvre and in the early history of Meiji Western-style portraiture.