Portrait of Shiratori Kenji, an Ainu Young Man

Portrait of Shiratori Kenji (アイヌの青年・白鳥健次氏の肖像) is an oil-on-canvas portrait dated 1911, painted by Aoyama Kumaji as a posthumous likeness of a young Ainu man whom Aoyama had befriended during his graduation-year stay in Hokkaidō. The 44.5 × 33.5 cm canvas shows Shiratori at half-length in three-quarter view, the dark frame of his hair and beard set against a deep green-brown ground. According to the museum's documentation, Shiratori was twenty-one years old at the time of his death in 1909, and Aoyama's painting was based on a photograph taken approximately one month before he died — making this work a memorial portrait composed from a photographic source rather than from direct sitting. The portrait is unusual in late-Meiji yōga for treating an Ainu subject by name and as a named individual: most period representations of Ainu people, whether ethnographic photographs or paintings, treated their subjects as anonymous type-specimens. Aoyama's portrait, by contrast, names its sitter and treats him with the formal seriousness customary in academic portraiture of European or Tokyo elites. The canvas is now in the collection of the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, and along with the 1907 Profile of an Ainu Woman it represents one of the most important encounters in late-Meiji Japanese art between Tokyo academic yōga and the indigenous communities of Hokkaidō.