Roses

Held in the Artizon Museum (Ishibashi Foundation Collection, formerly the Bridgestone Museum of Art) in Tokyo, Roses (Bara, 1932) is the masterwork of Yasui Sōtarō's still-life painting and the canvas through which the late still-life manner of Cézanne entered the standard Shōwa yōga repertoire. The vertical oil shows a tall arrangement of red and yellow roses in a tall glass vase on a plain white cloth, the flowers brought close to the picture plane and modelled in the firm contour drawing and constructive parallel-stroke handling that Yasui had developed from his sustained study of Cézanne since his Paris years of 1907 to 1914. The palette is severely held to red, rust, yellow-green and the chalky white of the cloth, the brushwork is unusually deliberate, and the composition is built on the vertical axis of the vase and the centred mass of the bouquet. The painting was acquired for the great Bridgestone collection assembled by Yasui's patron Ishibashi Shōjirō, founder of Bridgestone Tire, and the Bridgestone/Artizon Roses has been the canonical Japanese yōga still life of the mid-twentieth century.