Portrait of Aimitsu

Portrait of Aimitsu (靉光像) is a 45.7 × 37.8 cm oil on canvas painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1928. The sitter, Aimitsu — the brush name of Ishimura Nichirō (1907-1946) — was a younger painter from Hiroshima who would later emerge as one of the central figures of the Japanese Surrealist movement of the 1930s, eventually conscripted to the Chinese front in 1944 and dying of illness in Shanghai in 1946. At the time the portrait was made, Aimitsu was twenty-one years old and recently arrived in Tokyo from Hiroshima; he and Hasegawa, seventeen years his senior, were briefly close in the late 1920s and frequented the same Tabata and Reiganjima bars. The painting shows Aimitsu at half-length in three-quarter view, his face rendered in a thick impasto of red, ochre, and viridian paint, with the dark mass of his hair and the lighter-toned background built up in rapid strokes. The portrait is one of a small group of named portraits of Tokyo writers and artists that Hasegawa produced in the late 1920s and 1930s — alongside the portraits of Kishida Kunio (1930), Maeda Yūgure (1930), and Yano Fumio (1933) — and as a portrait of one major artist by another it has particular art-historical importance. It is now in a private collection.