Nikolai Cathedral

Nikolai Cathedral (ニコライ堂), painted around 1941 and held by the Miyagi Museum of Art, depicts the Holy Resurrection Cathedral in Kanda-Surugadai — the principal Japanese Orthodox cathedral, completed in 1891 under the supervision of Archbishop Nikolai of Japan and a defining landmark of the prewar Tokyo skyline. Matsumoto returned to the subject several times across the wartime years; this small oil on canvas, approximately thirty-eight by forty-five centimetres, is among the most concentrated of the variants. The composition is taken from below and slightly to the side, the dome and bell tower of the cathedral rising into the slate-blue sky of the contemporary 'blue period' paintings, the foreground given over to the muted browns and greys of the surrounding streets. The handling is uniformly dry and inscribed, the colour held to a narrow range of cool blues and dusty browns. The painter's choice of a Russian Orthodox cathedral as a recurrent wartime subject — at a time when Russia was a wartime ally of the United States and the cathedral itself was treated with some official suspicion — has come to be read as one further instance of his quiet refusal to adapt his subject matter to the demands of state ideology.