A Girl

A Girl (少女), drawn in 1941 in pencil, Japanese ink, charcoal and conté on paper, is one of the most concentrated of Matsumoto Shunsuke's surviving works on paper and one of the canvases in which the drawing-based foundation of his mature painting is laid most fully bare. The sitter, a young girl in three-quarter view, is rendered with the dry, inscribed contour that Matsumoto applied with equal economy to oil and to drawing; the surface is built up in layered strokes of pencil, ink and conté, the modelling held to broad zones of grey, brown and black. The drawing belongs to the same period as the Mizue essay 'A Living Painter' and the great Portrait of the Artist of August 1941, and it shares with those works the moral seriousness and the restrained, observed sympathy that mark Matsumoto's best wartime portraits. It is held by the Iwate Museum of Art, the principal monographic collection of his work and the museum closest to the Hanamaki and Morioka of his youth.