Master of Restaurant Mansaku

Master of Restaurant Mansaku (食堂万作の主) is a small 16.5 × 11.5 cm oil on glass painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki around 1937. The sitter is the owner of Mansaku, a small restaurant of the kind Hasegawa frequented in the Shitamachi districts of Tokyo, where painters traded oil sketches and watercolors for meals and drink. The work is one of a small group of paintings on glass — a deliberately fragile and unusual support, painted from the back so that the image is seen through the glass — that Hasegawa produced in the late 1930s as small intimate portraits for the bar and restaurant owners who hosted him. The painting shows the master at half-length in three-quarter view, his face rendered in thickly applied red and ochre paint with the dark mass of his hair against a flat background. The choice of glass as a support and the very small scale of the work indicate that it was made as a gift or in exchange for hospitality rather than for the Nikakai exhibition wall, and it is characteristic of the way Hasegawa's late paintings dissolved the boundary between exhibition art and the social economy of the Tokyo bar. The painting is in a private collection.