Woman Plucking Grasses

In the grass of the foreground a woman crouches, picking grass, painted small. Behind her, houses with white walls and reddish-brown roofs line up side by side, and a few thin trees stand at the right foreground. Blue and white clouds mingle in the sky, and a warm, yellowish sunlight melts into the whole picture.

According to the museum's commentary, Kuroda went to France at eighteen and spent about nine years there. He first went to study law, but after meeting the painter Yamamoto Hosui and the art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa in Paris, he turned to painting. He studied under Raphael Collin, who led the "plein-air school," a style that compromised between the Impressionist technique of painting bright light and academic subjects.

This work is from his study years, and the previous year's "Picking Herbs" also shows a woman in the same pose picking wild plants. Kuroda also had a period of devotion to Millet, and this work recalls his working peasants, but its technique is described as Impressionist. After returning to Japan he formed the Hakubakai and became head of the Western painting department at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, bringing innovation to Japanese Western-style painting. The canvas is 63.5 cm high and 81.0 cm wide.