Self-Portrait with a Palette

Self-Portrait with a Palette (パレットを持つ自画像) is a 91.2 × 91.2 cm square oil on canvas painted by Aoyama Kumaji in 1932, the year of his death. The artist shows himself at half-length in three-quarter view, dressed in a brown studio coat and holding a wooden artist's palette loaded with paint, with a brush in his other hand. The neutral mid-toned ground throws his face and the bright spots of the palette into relief, and the painting is rendered with the saturated palette and confident, broad brushwork of his mature work. Self-portraits with palette and brushes are a standard genre in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European painting (compare Rembrandt, Courbet, Cézanne), and Aoyama's example places him deliberately within that tradition: the painter as a self-conscious heir to a European lineage, observed in his working clothes and tools rather than in the formal portrait dress of an academician. The square format, unusual for Japanese self-portraits of the period, and the dignified, restrained presentation give the work a quality of summing-up. It was painted shortly before Aoyama's sudden death in December 1932, and as a result it stands as one of the most fully realized self-portraits by a Japanese yōga painter of his generation. The canvas is in the collection of the Himeji City Museum of Art in his native Hyōgo Prefecture.