Life Saver

Life Saver (水難救助員, Suinan Kyūjoin — Water Rescue Worker) is an oil on canvas of 1924, measuring approximately 76.4 × 63.8 cm and now in the Fukutake Collection, which holds one of the largest and most important groups of Kuniyoshi paintings in Japan and which has long been deposited at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art in the artist's birthplace of Okayama. The picture shows a single seated figure — a young woman with the heavy belt and floats of a beach lifesaver, her hands quietly in her lap, her gaze cast slightly to the side — against an undefined, atmospheric ground. It is one of the works in which Kuniyoshi began to move away from the cow-and-child fables of his earliest years toward the lone, contemplative female figure that would dominate the rest of his career. The Life Saver belongs to the same year as Island of Happiness and is closely related to it in its compressed, slightly elegiac handling of the human figure on a flat, almost stage-like ground; together the two paintings document Kuniyoshi's increasing absorption of Pascin-derived School of Paris influence in the period leading up to his first European trip with Katherine Schmidt in 1925. The painting's presence in the Fukutake Collection, in Okayama, gives it special significance as one of the most fully realized Kuniyoshi works in his hometown.