Postman (Bust)

Painted in early 1928 during the last months of his life, the Postman is one of the most affecting of Saeki Yūzō's late Paris paintings and one of only a small number of late figure paintings to survive. The sitter, an unidentified Paris postman in the dark blue uniform and red-cuffed jacket of the late-1920s Service postal, is shown in bust length, the face rendered in firm contour with the dry, scraped handling characteristic of the late paintings, and the lettering on the uniform's collar inscribed with the calligraphic certainty that Saeki by this point applied indifferently to wall posters and to costume. The painting is consciously framed in dialogue with Van Gogh's celebrated 1888 Joseph Roulin portraits — the postman as the iconic working-class sitter — and Saeki's almost ritual choice of the subject in his last months marks the consummation of his long engagement with the Post-Impressionist tradition that had begun with the encounter with Vlaminck four years before. The painting was completed shortly before Saeki's collapse, hospitalisation at Épinay-sur-Seine and death in August 1928. It is held by the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka.