Portrait of a Woman

Painted in January 1942 and exhibited at Matsumoto Shunsuke's second solo exhibition in February of that year, Portrait of a Woman (婦人像) is one of the most intimate of the small portraits he produced in the early wartime years. The sitter, an unidentified woman in three-quarter view, is rendered at small scale (thirty-five by twenty-eight centimetres) in the dry, inscribed handling that distinguishes Matsumoto's mature work: contours firmly drawn in black, modelling held to broad zones of slate blue and dusty brown, the surface scraped and laid bare to show the texture of the board on which the painting is made. The painting belongs to the same January-February 1942 group that produced Backside of Tokyo Station, Station and a number of other small canvases for the second solo exhibition, 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 Okawa Museum of Art in Kiryū, Gunma Prefecture, one of the smaller but important regional collections of his work.