Self-Portrait

The Self-Portrait of 1930, held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), is Nakamura Fusetsu's canonical late-career self-portrait, painted in his sixty-fourth year at the height of his reputation as painter, illustrator and calligraphic scholar. The oil shows the artist in three-quarter view against a neutral ground, his head turned toward the viewer, wearing the dark Japanese-style robe (kimono with haori) that he habitually wore in his Negishi studio in preference to the Western suit favoured by many of his Paris-trained contemporaries, and gazing out from beneath the close-cropped grey hair and full white moustache that contemporary photographs record. The handling is firm, low-keyed and built up in the patient academic modelling that Fusetsu had absorbed from Jean-Paul Laurens thirty years earlier, with the play of cool studio light across the forehead and cheek picking out the deep-set eyes and pursed mouth of the calligrapher and the long, scholarly fingers resting against the robe's dark fall. As the principal self-portrait of his Shōwa career — painted in the same period as the publication of his great calligraphic anthologies and the early planning of the Shodō Hakubutsukan — the canvas occupies an emblematic place in the iconography of Meiji-trained yōga in its old age.