Okada Saburosuke moved to Tokyo with his father as an infant and spent his childhood in the mansion of the former daimyo of Saga, Nabeshima Naohiro, in Aoizaka, Kojimachi Ward. There he encountered the work of Hyakutake Kaneyuki, a Western-style painter, and was allowed to use paints sent from Italy. In that free environment, he decided to became a Western-style painter. Through Kume Keiichiro, an old friend, he was introduced to Kuroda Seiki and studied his painting style, with its clear, bright colors. He was involved in forming the Hakubakai in 1896 and was appointed an assistant professor in the newly established Western Painting Faculty of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The following year he received one of the first Ministry of Education study abroad grants and went to France, where he studied with Raphael Collin, who was also Kuroda’s and Kume’s instructor. There he studied, on a foundation of classic realism, the plein air style, trying to capture the brightness of the out of doors in warm colors and harmonize them within the picture plane.
Okada showed this painting at the tenth Bunten, in 1916. While painted in oils, it has the feel of pastels, softly depicting the nude’s skin, in a visible effort to represent skin in a plein air style. The woman standing by the water is Japanese but the pink and dark blue fabric remind us that this work is grounded in traditional Western bathing pictures. One says the gypsy rose blooming on the bank suggests, given that flower’s associations, that this painting is tied to a tale of tragic love.