Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait (自画像) is a small 36.8 × 23.1 cm watercolor on paper painted by Hasegawa Toshiyuki in 1938, two years before his death. The artist shows himself at half-length, the face rendered in rapid transparent washes of pink, ochre, and viridian over pencil drawing, the figure isolated against the white of the unworked paper. The painting belongs to a small group of late watercolor self-portraits that Hasegawa made in the last years of his life as he moved between the Asakusa, Tabata, and Reiganjima bars and the cheap rooming houses he was using as occasional studio space. The looseness of the brushwork, the transparency of the washes, and the unflinching observational quality of the face — the lines of strain, the tilted angle of the head — give the painting a quality of confrontational self-witness that distinguishes it from the more conventional yōga self-portrait tradition of his contemporaries. He was forty-seven at the time the painting was made and would die of malnutrition in the public welfare ward of Itabashi Hospital two years later. The sheet is now in a private collection.