Background
Harada Naojirō was born in the Koishikawa area of Edo (modern Tokyo) on 12 October 1863. He was the second son of Ai and Ichidō.
原田 直次郎
Harada Naojirō was born in the Koishikawa area of Edo (modern Tokyo) on 12 October 1863. He was the second son of Ai and Ichidō.
Ichidō worked for the military government at the Bansho Shirabesho, where foreign books were studied and translated.
From the age of eleven Harada began studying yōga Western-style painting under Yamazaki Nariaki, and from 20 under Takahashi Yuichi, who at the time was the most prominent yōga painter in Japan. While in Munich he befriended the German painter Julius Exter and the Japanese writer Mori Ōgai, who had been dispatched to Germany by the Ministry of War of Japan. In 1886 he began to live with a woman named Marie who worked in a café on the ground floor of the building he lodged in.
Around that October he guided Viscount Hamao Arata around, who was on a government tour of inspection abroad.
On 22 November he left a pregnant Marie and toured Switzerland, Venice, and Rome, meeting Japanese painters there, and audited classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He left France in May the next year.
Paintings by Harada Naojirō.