City Scene

City Scene (街景) is an undated oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, executed at some point before his death in 1945 and most likely during the late Tokyo years of the 1930s rather than during his American or European period. The composition shows an unidentified urban view — possibly Asakusa or one of the working-class districts of central Tokyo, possibly a generic streetscape — rendered in the broader, more saturated late style that Shimizu developed after his return from Paris. The painting documents the continued importance of the urban-scene subject to his work throughout his career, from the New York Chinatown and Icecream Pavilion of 1922 through the Paris and Madrid compositions of 1925-26 to the Tokyo paintings of the 1930s. The exact date is undocumented in the published literature, and the work is held in a private collection in Japan; it is in the public domain in Japan and is reproduced from a Wikimedia Commons scan.