Portrait of Mrs. F.

Painted in 1939 and reproduced in Penelope Mason's standard History of Japanese Art (Prentice Hall, second edition 2004), Portrait of Mrs. F. — also identified in the literature as the Portrait of Mrs. Fukushima — is among the late-1930s commissioned female portraits in which Yasui Sōtarō consolidated the Yasui-shiki shōzō of the 1934 Tamamushi Sensei and Chin-Jung paintings. The vertical oil, 88 by 66 cm, shows the sitter seated half-length, the body brought close to the picture plane and the gaze turned slightly aside in the formal pose of the late-1930s commissioned portrait. The handling is the mature constructive Cézannism of Yasui's pre-war years — the contour drawing firm and dark, the modelling broken into measured planes of dulled green, slate and chalky flesh tones, the local colour kept severely low — and the composition is built on the tightly contoured triangular mass of the sitter against the warm umber ground. Together with the 1937 Portrait of Fukai Eigo and the 1936 Portrait of Konoe Fumimaro, the painting completes the late-1930s sequence of commissioned portraits that defined Yasui's pre-war public reputation.