Nude in the Trees

Held in the Museum of Art, Ehime, Nude in the Trees (Jūka rafu, 1919) is among the small group of paintings that Yasui Sōtarō produced in the difficult years of convalescence between his sensational 1915 Nikakai debut and the consolidation of his mature Shōwa portrait manner in the mid-1920s. The painting, a vertical oil of moderate size, shows a single female nude seated on a fallen tree-trunk among the dappled greens of a wooded grove, the figure brought close to the picture plane and modelled in the parallel-stroke Cézannism that Yasui had carried back from Paris. The lower-keyed palette, the constructive drawing, and the meditative quietness of the figure in the landscape mark the work as a transitional canvas, conserving the Paris technique of the 1914 Bathing Nudes while moving toward the more concentrated, frontal portraiture of the Black-Haired Woman of 1924. As a record of Yasui's painting in the immediate post-Nikakai years and as a fine example of yōga in the manner of Cézanne's late bather subjects, the painting is one of the most representative works of the artist's early Taishō period.