Sick Boy

Reproduced as plate 9 in Arishima Ikuma Gashū: Jinbutsu Shōzō-hen (Atelier-sha, Tokyo, 1932), Sick Boy (病兒) is a half-length oil portrait of a fair-haired Western boy in a horizontally striped red-and-cream rugby shirt, his head turned slightly to his right and his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the viewer with the unsettling intensity that Arishima Ikuma reserved for his portraits of children. The skin of the cheeks and throat is brought to the high pink-and-green key that signals the title's pathological subject, and the dabbed brushwork of the shirt's stripes and the freely-painted grey-green ground show Arishima at his most clearly Cézannesque, well after his return from Paris in 1910. The convention of the sickbed portrait — a child observed in convalescence — was a fixture of late-nineteenth-century European painting, recurring in the work of Edvard Munch and the Norwegians and in Berthe Morisot and the French Impressionists; Arishima's contribution domesticates the genre in his own family circle and remains one of the most memorable of the album's child portraits.