Merry-Go-Round

Merry-Go-Round (メリー・ゴーランド) is a 72.7 × 60.7 cm oil on canvas painted by Shimizu Toshi in 1925, the year after he and his wife arrived in Paris from New York. The composition shows a carnival merry-go-round — possibly the carousel at the Bois de Boulogne or one of the seasonal Parisian fairs — with painted horses, mirrored panels, and a crowd of waiting families. The brighter palette and the more saturated handling of decorative surfaces register the impact of the French color sensibility on Shimizu's work, while the underlying compositional structure remains continuous with his New York urban paintings. The carousel as subject belongs to a small but important early-twentieth-century iconography that runs from Robert Delaunay's Manège (1922) to the photographs of Eugène Atget; Shimizu's Merry-Go-Round can be read as a Japanese-American observation of the same Parisian leisure culture that the European modernists were treating during the same years. The painting was owned privately as of 1982 and was exhibited at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art monographic exhibition of that year; it is in the public domain and reproduced from a high-resolution scan.