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Kuroda Seiki — Morning Toilette (Chōsō), 1893

Chōsō (朝粧, Morning Toilette), 1893, by Kuroda Seiki (1866–1924). Oil on canvas; 181.0 × 99.8 cm (destroyed; known from photographs). The most controversial Meiji-era oil painting, depicting a nude Japanese woman at her morning bath. Exhibited at the Paris Salon (1893) before being shown in Japan, where its nudity provoked protests and led to police screening of viewers.

Scholarly Significance

Anchor the introduction of Western academic oil painting (Yoga) to Japan with Kuroda Seiki's Morning Toilette — the work that caused a public scandal over female nudity in Meiji Japan.

Notes

·Painted in Paris under the direct influence of Kuroda's teacher Raphael Collin (academic French painter).
·Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1893 as 'La Toilette du matin' to moderate critical reception in France.
·When exhibited in Japan at the 3rd National Industrial Exhibition (1895) and the White Horse Society show (1895), police required viewers to approach only from the rear — the lower body was screened with a bamboo partition.
·The scandal crystallised the Meiji debate between Western-style yoga and Japanese-style nihonga, and between Western modernity and Confucian decorum.
·The painting is believed to have been destroyed (possibly in the 1945 Tokyo firebombing); its destruction is unconfirmed.
·Kuroda's public nude established that Yoga artists would engage academic Western genres, not merely transfer Western techniques to Japanese subjects.