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Lot Essay
A young boy leaves the main building of Toshogu Shrine in Ueno Park, Tokyo, flanked by his mother and grandmother, with other family members following behind. This undated painting is very close in composition and style to Harada’s 1891 oil painting of a family group at Toshogu Shrine sold at Christie’s, New York, on November 10, 2000. The latter, now in the Okayama Prefectural Art Museum, was featured in the important 2016 retrospective of Harada’s work shown at four major Japanese museums.
Harada was among the first generation of Japanese artists trained in the West in the late nineteenth century. He had a spectacular but all-too-short career, dying at the age of thirty-six. His childhood was privileged. Harada’s father, a samurai who accompanied several government missions to Europe, wanted his son to have an international outlook. Harada learned French from childhood, began studying painting at age eleven and at age twenty became a student of Takahashi Yuichi (1826–1894), one of the first Western-style painters in Japan. A year later, in 1884, Harada went to Germany (following in the footsteps of his older brother), studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and took private lessons with Gabriel von Max (1840–1915). One of Harada’s most famous paintings is a brooding, romanticized 1886 oil portrait of a German shoemaker, a registered Important Cultural Property in the collection of the Tokyo University of the Arts.
Returning to Japan in 1887, Harada opened a private school at his home in 1889, promoting the next generation of modern, Western-style painters, including Wada Eisaku, at a time when many were already advocating a return to traditional Japanese art. In fact, when Tokyo University of the Arts opened in 1889, no course in Western-style painting was offered.
Harada was among the first generation of Japanese artists trained in the West in the late nineteenth century. He had a spectacular but all-too-short career, dying at the age of thirty-six. His childhood was privileged. Harada’s father, a samurai who accompanied several government missions to Europe, wanted his son to have an international outlook. Harada learned French from childhood, began studying painting at age eleven and at age twenty became a student of Takahashi Yuichi (1826–1894), one of the first Western-style painters in Japan. A year later, in 1884, Harada went to Germany (following in the footsteps of his older brother), studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and took private lessons with Gabriel von Max (1840–1915). One of Harada’s most famous paintings is a brooding, romanticized 1886 oil portrait of a German shoemaker, a registered Important Cultural Property in the collection of the Tokyo University of the Arts.
Returning to Japan in 1887, Harada opened a private school at his home in 1889, promoting the next generation of modern, Western-style painters, including Wada Eisaku, at a time when many were already advocating a return to traditional Japanese art. In fact, when Tokyo University of the Arts opened in 1889, no course in Western-style painting was offered.