Italy

Italy (イタリア) is a 1926 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted toward the end of his European travels in the year before his return to Japan. The painting depicts an Italian subject — most likely a southern Italian or Tuscan landscape with figures, in the conventional European mode of the early-twentieth-century Italian travel painting — rendered with a brighter palette and a slightly higher key than the Spanish works of the previous year. Shimizu and his wife Sonoko had moved through Spain and France during 1925 and then south into Italy in 1926, and his Italian paintings are correspondingly small in number and dated late in the European itinerary. Italy stands as the final painting of his European period before the return to Tokyo and the founding of the Independent Art Association. The work is in a private collection in Japan and is in the public domain.