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...for reasons of propriety.... we cannot see the naked male model....

Foxglove Well now, you win the prize for telling us what they were painting!

Simple! They were 'en plein air'. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_plein_air "...This situation improved later in the 1800s when tubes of oil paint became available, allowing En plein air painting to become viable for more artists. This was in part because of the invention of the collapsible paint tube in 1841 by American portraitist John G. Rand. ..."

beachcomber australia Ha! But we want somewhere a little more specific. We're mean like that.

They look to be at the entrance to a yard full of outbuildings, I am guessing that they are painting the Big House?

That is the sacred torii of Akama Shrine in Shimonoseki. Nowadays there is a road in front of the torii over some land gained to the sea. The other coast we see in this beautiful photo is Kita-Kyushu, the northern part of the next japanese island: Kyushu. The strait is only about 1 Km wide here, between Honshu and Kyushu islands. Since some decades, there is a tunnel that link them under the water and a famous bridge. Anecdotically, Shimonoseki was the first japanese village ever visited by a culturized european (he was the basque priest Francisco Xabier, in 1550) and, ten years ago, the japanese institutions built a monument dedicated to him just at some meters to the right from the location of the photographer who originally took this picture.

What a difference time makes in all things ideological and concrete. It would have been a great voyage from san francisco to yokohama.