Portrait of Tamamushi Sensei

Held in the Ishibashi Museum of Art at Kurume, in the Ishibashi Foundation Collection, Portrait of Tamamushi Sensei (Tamamushi-sensei-zō, 1934) is one of the central works of Yasui Sōtarō's great 1934 portrait pair, the other being the Portrait of Chin-Jung now at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. The vertical oil shows the elderly sitter — the Kyoto scholar and teacher Tamamushi — seated three-quarter-length in a Japanese-style robe, the head brought frontally to the picture plane in the firm contour drawing and chalky modelling that defined Yasui's Cézannist portrait manner of the early-Shōwa period. The painting was commissioned through the network of Kyoto patrons who had supported the Asai Chū circle since the Meiji years, and the gravity of the sitting and the disciplined control of the palette — slate, dull green, rust and the warm flesh tones of the face and hands — make this one of the most concentrated examples of the Yasui-shiki shōzō. The Ishibashi acquisition of the work was part of the same systematic programme through which the Bridgestone founder Ishibashi Shōjirō assembled the modern Japanese collection that is now divided between the Artizon Museum in Tokyo and the Ishibashi Museum of Art at Kurume.