Portrait of a Finnish Woman

Reproduced as plate 11 in Arishima Ikuma Gashū: Jinbutsu Shōzō-hen (Atelier-sha, Tokyo, 1932), Portrait of a Finnish Woman (フィンランド婦人像) is a half-length oil portrait of a dark-haired woman in a sleeveless dark-green patterned vest seated against a warm wine-red ground stencilled with floral motifs. The title identifies the sitter only by nationality and reflects the broad European range of Arishima's portrait subjects during and after his Paris years — French, Italian, Finnish and Russian sitters all appear in the 1932 album, a small ethnographic record of the foreign communities the painter encountered in Paris and on later European visits. The composition is built on the heavy contrast between the deep-red background and the cool olive-green of the patterned vest, with the flesh tones of the face and bare arms acting as the warm mid-key that holds the picture together. The drawing of the eyes and mouth is unusually direct and slightly mannered, and shows the painter's continued allegiance to the Cézannesque constructive portrait at a moment when most of his Tokyo contemporaries had already moved on to softer, more decoratively coloured idioms.