Notre-Dame

Painted in 1925 during Saeki Yūzō's first Paris residency, Notre-Dame stands apart from the closely worked back-street paintings of the same year by virtue of its monumental subject and the resulting shift in scale. The cathedral is approached from the south, the towers anchoring the upper register of the canvas and the buttressed flank of the nave rising over the Seine in a single steep diagonal. Where Saeki's Rue Brancion and 15th Arrondissement of Paris of the same year cling close to walls and signs, Notre-Dame opens out into clear architectural space; what holds the canvas to the rest of the 1925 cycle is the dry, almost calligraphic stroke with which the painter draws the building's silhouette, the inscribed line of the masonry and the muted greys, ochres and umbers of the river façade. The painting was one of the works through which Saeki first established his Paris reputation; it is held in the collection of his middle-school alma mater, the Osaka Prefectural Kitano High School, to which it was donated after his death.