He exhibits a painting he made in Paris showing a woman standing before a mirror, a painting called Morning Toilette. And he brings that back to Japan and he teaches people in Japan that this is the new mode of Western painting. He also learned the practices that were typical in studios at the time-of drawing from life, of drawing from plaster models: drawing as being the basis of representation. Kuroda went and studied with him and he himself learned the techniques of oil painting. One of these, Kuroda Seiki, studied with a painter named Raphael Collin. In the case of Western style painting in late nineteenth-century Japan, we have a number of artists who go to Paris to learn new styles. “Clearly the cultural convergences over time have had an impact on artistic innovation. Yet, the gold, planar background is reminiscent of the gilded folding screens popular during Japan’s Momoyama Period (1573–1615). His three nude figures, justified by the painting’s allegorical title, are rendered with the plasticity and volume typical of French academic painting. In the triptych, or three-paneled work, Kuroda attempts to meld aspects of Japanese and European art. Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment, one of the artist’s most controversial works, was created in 1899, six years after Kuroda had returned to Japan from Paris and shortly after he was named the first professor of Western-style painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Although Japanese audiences were quite familiar with erotic prints, the notion that the naked woman, allegorical or otherwise, could be the subject of large-scale formal painting was entirely new to them. From Collin, Kuroda learned the art of plein air painting, or painting out-of-doors, and developed an interest in representing the female nude, a perennial motif in Western art and a mainstay of Parisian Salon exhibitions. Like a number of other practitioners of yōga, Seiki Kuroda received his artistic training in Europe, where he studied with French painter Raphael Collin. These two conflicting trends led to the emergence of yōga, Japanese oil on canvas painting in the Western style, and nihonga, or Japanese-style painting. At the same time, the growing desire to define a national identity meant that artists were self-consciously looking back at traditional Japanese styles and techniques. The Meiji government was intent on the modernization of Japan, an agenda that meant both the adoption of new technologies and the acquisition of Western knowledge.Īrtistic and cultural exchange between Japan and the West flourished under the Meiji rulers. During the Meiji era, which lasted from 1868 to 1912, interaction with the outside world was vigorously promoted.