Outskirts of Toledo

Outskirts of Toledo (トレドの郊外) is a 1925 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted during his Spanish travels in the year following his arrival in Europe. The composition shows the dry, hilly countryside outside the Castilian city of Toledo, with a procession of soldiers and monks moving along a road through the cleared landscape — a subject that combines Shimizu's interest in the human figure with the formal structure of Spanish topography. Toledo was at the time still bearing the visual marks of nineteenth-century Spanish military and ecclesiastical life, and Shimizu's painting documents an encounter with that residual world from the vantage of a Japanese painter trained in the Ashcan tradition and now traveling in Catholic southern Europe. The work was recognized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, the long-running unjuried salon founded in 1884 by Seurat, Signac, and others — an early French institutional acknowledgment of his Spanish-period work. The painting is reproduced from a public-domain scan on Wikimedia Commons and is held in a private collection in Japan.