Snow Scene in Paris

Painted in early 1925 during Saeki Yūzō's first Paris winter, Snow Scene in Paris is one of the most lyrical of his 1925 canvases and a small but characteristic document of his early-Paris atmospheric range. The composition is taken from a back street with low buildings on either side and a long perspective opening toward an indeterminate distance; the snow is laid in as broad, dry sweeps of off-white, the building façades reduced to thinly inscribed planes of greenish grey, and the sky a chalky band along the top of the canvas. Where the major 1925 canvases such as Cordonnerie and Rue Brancion exploit the dry, inscribed handling of plaster and lettering, the snow scene exploits the same technique to register the muffled, light-absorbing surface of a city under a winter blanket. The painting was reproduced in the 1978 memorial exhibition catalogue published by the Asahi Shimbun and remains in private hands.