Landscape

Landscape (1920) is one of the earliest paintings by Yasuo Kuniyoshi in a public collection, an oil on canvas of modest dimensions (16 1/8 × 20 1/8 inches; 40.8 × 51.2 cm) acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1965 and catalogued there under accession number 1965.38. It belongs to the very beginning of his mature practice, painted while he was still a student at the Art Students League under Kenneth Hayes Miller and only a year or two before his first solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in New York in 1922. The composition combines a low, rolling pastoral foreground with cattle and small figures against a deep blue-green ridge of hills, and it shows the artist already working out the strange, slightly unreal scale and the simplified, almost folk-art shape language that would define his early work. The painting is closely related to a series of small landscapes Kuniyoshi made in his first summers in Ogunquit, Maine, where he and his wife Katherine Schmidt summered with the artists' colony around Hamilton Easter Field's school, and to which he repeatedly returned in his earliest years as an exhibiting painter. The picture's compressed pictorial space and its quiet, almost emblematic handling of cattle as set-piece figures look forward to the major early paintings of cows and farm life that would follow within a few years.