Seine Riverside

Seine Riverside (セーヌ河畔) is a c. 1925 oil on canvas by Shimizu Toshi, painted during his Paris period in the year following his arrival from New York. The composition shows a riverside view of the Seine in Paris — almost certainly along the Île de la Cité or in one of the adjacent quays — with a quayside walk, boats on the river, and the architecture of the Right Bank rising in the background. The palette is more saturated than the New York night scenes and the brushwork is broader, marking the impact of French painting on Shimizu's mature style. Seine Riverside belongs to a small group of Paris-period compositions that he produced in 1924-1925 before traveling south to Spain, and it documents his immediate response to the Île-de-France visual idiom that had formed so much of the international vocabulary of yōga painting since Kuroda Seiki's Paris years of the 1880s. The painting is in a private collection in Japan and is in the public domain.