Portrait of Popov

Portrait of Popov (ポポフの肖像) is a 1914 oil on canvas by Aoyama Kumaji painted during his Russian sojourn, which he had begun the previous year by traveling overland from the Manchurian port of Dalian across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The sitter, identified in the title only by his surname, was a Russian acquaintance from Aoyama's time in European Russia; nothing further about his identity has been securely documented. The portrait shows Popov in three-quarter view against a dark ground, with a heavy winter coat and the bearded face that recurs in Aoyama's Russian portraits of the period. The 1914 date places the work at the beginning of the First World War, before the disruptions of the Russian Revolution that would close European Russia to Japanese travelers in 1917; Aoyama continued painting in Russia and Europe through and beyond the war, returning to Japan only in 1922. The painting is one of a small group of Russian-period works by Aoyama documented in Japanese public and corporate collections, including the View in Moscow and A Russian Girl of the following year, and it belongs to the larger body of Russian and European studies that gave his postwar Teiten paintings their characteristic palette. It now belongs to the Tan'yō Shinkin Bank in his birthplace of Asago.