that courses in anatomy and the sketching of a live nude model be included in the curriculum. Ultimately, Kuroda set as his goal the teaching of history painting, feeling that it was the most important genre for students to learn. In his opinion, paintings depicting myths, history, or themes such as love or courage, in which figures painted in poses and compositions reflecting these issues had the highest social value. Coinciding with this was the creation of one of his most ambitious works, the Talk on Ancient Romance. The painting was a large undertaking; it seems to have been among the first for which Kuroda employed charcoal drawings and oil sketches. He would go on to employ this technique in most of his later work, teaching it to his students as well. Talk on Ancient Romance appears to have been intended as a wall panel; as with much of Kuroda's work, it was destroyed during World War II, leaving only preparatory studies to indicate its possible grandeur. Later career Kuroda was by this time well-regarded not only by the Japanese, but by the art world at large; his triptych Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment (completed 1900) was exhibited alongside his 1897 work Lakeside at the Exposition Universelle held in 1900 in Paris; it received a silver medal. Lakeside, however, is arguably Kuroda's most famous and recognizable work in Japan. It depicts Kuroda's wife Teruko, seated by a lake in the famous resort town of Hakone. Lakeside represents the apotheosis of Kuroda's personal style, in which he dialed back the more controversial aspects of European Impressionism to combine it with aspects of Academicism and the Barbizon School, while emphasizing native Japanese subjects such as Japanese landscapes and clothing. The result was a hybrid style art historian Chinghsin Wu has termed "Academic Impressionism," which Kuroda thought was more palatable to Japanese tastes and sensibilities. In 1907, members of the White Horse Society, Kuroda among them, exhibited in the first Bunten exhibition, sponsored by the Ministry of Education; their continued participation led to the disbanding of the group in 1911. Meanwhile, Kuroda had been appointed a court painter at the Imperial Court in 1910, becoming the first yōga artist so honored. From then until the end of his life his artistic activities were curtailed; he became more of a politician and an administrator, only creating small works intended for display. In 1917, on the death