Tsuguharu Foujita

Acquired directly from the artist by the family of the present owner in 1954

Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Long Island Collects the Figure & Landscape, 1990
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Long Island Collections, 1993
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Long Island Collections, 2002
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Master Artworks from Private Collections, 2005

This painting has been recently restored and should be hung as is. The canvas has been lined with a synthetic adhesive; the tacking edges are fully intact. The paint layer is stable and clean. Under ultraviolet light although the original paint shows quite darkly in some areas, no retouches are visible. The painting should be hung as is. The above condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Painted in 1954, the present work is testament to some of the major preoccupations of Tsuguharu Foujita's mature period. In discussing this period and the artist's focus on the female model in medieval dress, Robert Rey notes, "in Asia, every childhood is sacred. ...it is by instinct that Foujita transforms the children of France into fairies. Consider what becomes of Cosette from Vicor Hugo's Les Misérables, a book the artist perhaps never read...: a little girl unburdened by the slightest misery" (quoted in Sylvie Buisson, Foujita et ses amis du Montparnasse, Paris, 2010, p. 134). Foujita's paintings from this period increasingly combined religious or historical imagery with a remarkable sensibility for feminine expression to create images subtly laden with suggestion and strong visual impact. As Sylvie Buisson explains, "the boundaries between the sacred and the profane became confused" (ibid.).

In the present work, Foujita's elegant young girl is meditative and immutable, her large eyes fixed and blank. Her gaze and form are nevertheless delicately charged with an interior intensity as she playfully holds two kittens on her lap. The artist's modernity and originality reside in precisely this fusion of the formal training of his Japanese heritage, the finesse of his monochromatic lines, with the reinterpreted iconography and luminous palette of his adoptive country.