Portrait of Chin-Jung

Held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), Portrait of Chin-Jung (Kin'yō, 1934) is the most famous of the Yasui-shiki shōzō and the painting through which the artist's Cézannist portrait manner has been most often illustrated. The vertical oil, 96.5 by 74.5 cm, shows the Manchurian-born linguist Odagiri Mineko — a five-language speaker nicknamed Chin-Jung (金蓉, 'golden lotus') — seated frontally on a chair against a plain green ground, wearing a high-collared red Chinese qipao and with her gloved hands folded in her lap. Conservators have shown that the figure's left shoulder was reworked at a late stage from a position taken in one of the preparatory sketches, and Yasui himself described the working method by which he would draw the sitter from many angles over many sittings and then combine elements from different sketches in a single canvas to produce the latent suggestion that the body might at any moment begin to move. The painting won the Imperial Art Academy Prize at the 1934 Bunten and remains the canonical document of the mature Yasui portrait — the perfect realisation of the type first announced in the 1930 Portrait of a Woman and refined in the 1934 Tamamushi Sensei.