Goseda Yoshimatsu traveled to Paris in 1880 to study portraiture with the academy painter Léon Bonnat, and he soon became the first Japanese painter to be selected for the Salon, a juried international exhibition in Paris. After some seven years of study in Paris, he set out for the United States, where one of his patrons lived. It was in London, where he stopped on his way, that he made this painting. One theory is that the subject is Hosokawa Morishige, who was studying in France and England at the time, but that has not been confirmed. Morishige was a politician and the real brother and adopted father of Hosokawa Moritatsu, who was in turn the grandfather of former Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro. With few of Yoshimatsu’s Europe paintings still in existence, this rare portrait provides an indication of his techniques while he was studying abroad.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)
Goseda Yoshimatsu traveled to Paris in 1880 to study portraiture with the academy painter Léon Bonnat, and he soon became the first Japanese painter to be selected for the Salon, a juried international exhibition in Paris. After some seven years of study in Paris, he set out for the United States, where one of his patrons lived. It was in London, where he stopped on his way, that he made this painting. One theory is that the subject is Hosokawa Morishige, who was studying in France and England at the time, but that has not been confirmed. Morishige was a politician and the real brother and adopted father of Hosokawa Moritatsu, who was in turn the grandfather of former Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro. With few of Yoshimatsu’s Europe paintings still in existence, this rare portrait provides an indication of his techniques while he was studying abroad.
(KASHIWAGI Tomoh)