Self-Portrait with a Palette

Painted in 1924 shortly after Saeki Yūzō's arrival in Paris in the summer of that year, this self-portrait belongs to a brief moment in his career — perhaps a few weeks — when he was still working in the smoothly modulated, plein-air manner he had inherited from his Tokyo teachers Fujishima Takeji and the Kuroda Seiki tradition of the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The young painter is shown in three-quarter view holding the palette and brushes of his trade, the head and shoulders rendered in a soft, even light without the heavy contour or the dense impasto of his later canvases. It is the very canvas that, according to the well-rehearsed episode in Saeki's biography, the painter Satomi Katsuzō showed to Maurice de Vlaminck at Auvers-sur-Oise in the late summer of 1924, and that Vlaminck dismissed as 'académique' — a verdict so cutting that it precipitated Saeki's break with his early manner and his discovery of the contoured, calligraphic, sign-loving style for which he would become famous. The painting is therefore both the last document of Saeki the Tokyo academician and, by virtue of the encounter it occasioned, the prologue to his mature Paris cycle. It is held in the ENEOS Co. Ltd. collection.