Figures

Figures (人物) is a 33.3 × 45.2 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1929. The composition shows a group of seated and standing figures massed in an interior — most likely the back room of a bar or café of the kind Hasegawa habitually painted — with the bodies summarized in broad sweeps of red, ochre, and dark green-brown paint against a heavily worked background. The painting is small, rapid, and dense: there is no attempt at academic figure construction, and the individual sitters are characterized by posture and color rather than by drawn likeness. The work belongs to the group of small studio and bar paintings of the late 1920s — alongside A Child of the same year, Café Orient, and Café Entrance — that Hasegawa was producing in large numbers in the years immediately before and after his first Nikakai successes, often as quick exchanges for meals or drink at the establishments he frequented. The looseness of the brushwork and the saturation of the palette are characteristic of his Fauvist-Expressionist idiom of the period. The painting is now in a private collection in Japan.