Copy of "The Knight Errant" (after Sir John Everett Millais) 

This is a copy of an oil painting made using watercolors by Shimomura Kanzan while he was studying in England. A knight errant was a figure who wandered the land, helping people in distress in order to prove his chivalric virtues. The original oil painting, by British artist Sir John Everett Millais, is more than three times larger than the copy, and yet the copy is so powerful it hardly feels like a reduction. The woman’s translucent skin and the texture of the knight’s armor give it a sense of transparency and authenticity that even surpasses the original. It seems as if the artist is deliberately flaunting his technical prowess and the expressive power of Japanese painting compared to Western painting. After painstaking study of Western techniques including color tones and the depiction of light using oil paints, Kanzan returned to Japan and incorporated his findings into paintings that fused elements of Western painting with traditional Japanese techniques.
(YATSUYANAGI Sae)