Granddaughter

Held in the Ohara Museum of Art at Kurashiki, Granddaughter (Magomusume, 1950) is the most-loved of Yasui Sōtarō's post-war paintings and depicts the artist's three-year-old granddaughter Kazuko seated in a child's chair against a Cézannist patchwork of green and rose. The vertical oil, 90 by 71 cm, brings the small sitter close to the picture plane and shows her in red coat and white collar with hands resting in her lap, in the same pyramidal half-length composition that Yasui had used for the great portraits of the 1930s but with a new tenderness and a brightness of palette that has often been related to the freedom of his post-war years. The contour drawing is firm but lightened, the modelling is reduced to broad constructive planes of warm flesh tone, red, dulled green and pink, and the chair and the upholstered ground are built from the same parallel-stroke Cézannism that had defined the Chin-Jung of 1934. Painted in the year in which Yasui's reputation as the leading yōga painter of the post-war republic was being established through the Bungei Shunjū magazine covers, and acquired by the great Ohara collection at Kurashiki, the painting is one of the canonical images of Japanese realist portraiture of the immediate post-war years.