Woman in a Straw Hat

Signed in the lower-left corner "M. Arishima Paris 1909", Woman in a Straw Hat (麦藁帽をかぶれる女) is the most precisely dated of the small group of oil portraits that Arishima Ikuma painted during his three Paris years (1907-1910) and the canvas that has become emblematic of his European apprenticeship. The half-length portrait, of a fair-haired young woman in a navy-blue coat seated against a tan-brown ground, is dominated by a broad straw hat ringed with garlanded roses that fills the upper third of the composition and bends the brim down across the right side of her face. The chromatic structure — the heat of the straw against the cool blue of the coat, the warm flesh of the throat and shoulder against the rose accents of the lips and hat-flowers — is unmistakably indebted to the Cézanne retrospective Arishima had seen at the 1907 Salon d'Automne, and the freely brushed, drawing-led modelling shows the lessons of his Académie de la Grande Chaumière training under Raphaël Collin. The work was reproduced as plate 5 in the painter's 1932 portrait album Arishima Ikuma Gashū: Jinbutsu Shōzō-hen (Atelier-sha, Tokyo), one of the principal documentary sources for his pre-war oeuvre and the basis for most subsequent reproductions of his Paris portraits.