Tomoshibi o motsu otome (Young Woman with a Lamp)

Held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Yamamoto Hōsui's Tomoshibi o motsu otome (灯を持つ乙女, Young Woman with a Lamp, c. 1892) is among the most resolved of his Japanese-subject pictures from the years immediately following his 1888 return from Paris. The oil on canvas depicts a young woman in patterned kimono holding a small lamp before her, the figure lit chiefly by the lamp itself in a deliberate exercise in academic chiaroscuro of a kind associated with the Caravaggesque revival in late-nineteenth-century French painting that Hōsui had absorbed at the École des Beaux-Arts. The picture is contemporary with the great Jūnishi zodiac cycle of 1892 and shares its programme — to apply Gérôme's polished academic figure-painting to subjects drawn from Japanese custom and folklore — and it remains one of the most concentrated demonstrations of how the first generation of Paris-trained yōga painters sought to indigenise European academic technique. Acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, in the region of the painter's birth, it is one of the central works of the collection that the museum has built around Hōsui as its native son.