Seated Woman

Painted in 1929 and reproduced in the standard catalogues of Yasui Sōtarō's work, Seated Woman is one of the immediate antecedents of the great 1930 Portrait of a Woman that won the Imperial Art Academy Prize and confirmed Yasui as the leading portrait painter of late-Taishō and early-Shōwa yōga. The vertical canvas shows a Japanese sitter in a long-sleeved kimono, seated frontally in a high-backed chair, the body composed and the gaze directed slightly aside in the formal mood of the late-1920s commissioned portrait. The drawing is firm and contoured in the manner Yasui had developed from Cézanne, the modelling reduced to broad constructive planes of dulled green, slate and the warm flesh tones that he had perfected in his Paris years, and the chair, the kimono and the sitter's hands have been brought into a single tightly composed pyramidal mass. The painting documents the moment at which the Paris-trained Cézannist of 1914 began to consolidate the distinctive Yasui-shiki shōzō (Yasui-type portrait) of the 1930s — the type to which the great Portrait of a Woman, Portrait of Tamamushi Sensei and Portrait of Chin-Jung all belong.