Portrait of Yokoyama Taikan

Painted in 1943 at the request of the Imperial Household, Portrait of Yokoyama Taikan is the great portrait in which Yasui Sōtarō, the most authoritative Cézannist yōga painter of the day, took the measure of the venerable Yokoyama Taikan (1868-1958), the patriarch of the modern nihonga movement and a former director of the Japan Art Academy. The vertical oil shows the seventy-four-year-old Yokoyama seated half-length in dark formal Japanese dress, the head brought frontally to the picture plane and the body set against the warm umber ground in the firm contour drawing and chalky modelling of the mature Yasui-shiki shōzō. The commission belonged to the wartime programme of imperial portraits through which Yasui became the official portraitist of the late pre-war and wartime establishment, and the picture is one of the most remarkable cross-medium documents of the 1940s — one of the great oil painters of yōga portraying the leading figure of nihonga in the constructive Cézannist style that yōga had spent forty years naturalising in Japan. The painting was a critical sensation at its showing and is among the most reproduced of Yasui's wartime portraits.