Wada Eisaku (和田英作, December 23, 1874 – January 3, 1959) was a Japanese painter and luminary of the yōga (or Western-style) scene in the late Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras.

[3] Born in what is now the city of Tarumizu, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, in 1874, little Eisaku moved to Azabu in Tokyo with his family at the age of four or five when his father Wada Shūhō [ja], a pastor, was appointed as an instructor in English at the Naval Academy.

[4][5] After his death in 1892, Wada studied alongside Miyake at Harada Naojirō's Shōbikan (鍾美館); the same year his work featured at the 4th Meiji Bijutsu-kai [ja] Exhibition, and again at the 5th in 1893.

[3] After Harada's painting school closed in 1894, Wada studied under Kuroda Seiki and Kume Keiichirō, on their return from Paris, at their newly established Tenshin Dōjō (天真道場), where he became versed in pleinairism.

[4][5] Also in 1896, when Kuroda became Professor in the newly formed Department of Western-Style Painting (yōga) at the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts [ja], Wada, Fujishima Takeji, and Okada Saburōsuke were appointed Assistant Professors; however, in 1897 he resigned from his post, enrolling as a student in the same department, with special dispensation to enter as a fourth-year student, whence he then became the first to graduate, his graduation piece being his 1897 Evening at the Ferry Crossing.

[4][5] He spent half of 1898 guiding Adolf Fischer (de), future founder of the Museum of East Asian Art (Cologne), around various locales, including the Kinai and Hokuriku regions and Kyūshū.

[3] In 1951 he was recognized as a Person of Cultural Merit[3] and moved to Shimizu in Shizuoka Prefecture, where he died in 1959, posthumously receiving the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 1st Class.

[3] Representative works include his early Evening at the Ferry Crossing (1897), Thoughts of Home (1902), and Kodama (1902); his mid-life series of portraits; and his late Ue-no-Midō (1945) and Summer Clouds (1950).

[2] Kodama, inspired by the classical sculptures in the Louvre, and translated alternatively by Harada as Echo, is said to combine French Academism with German Expressionism as a "complete restatement and settlement" (総決算)[4] of Wada's period of study abroad;[4][12] in Harada's words, it "evokes a Romantic sensuousness through gentle shading of the figure and barely visible handling of the brush";[2] the painting has also been likened in effect to Munch's The Scream.