By HIROSHI ONO/ Staff Writer
March 22, 2024 at 08:00 JST
Mitsunobu Kojima, left, director of the Yumeji Art Museum, and acting director Hiromi Kojima show “Amaryllis,” a long-lost oil painting by Yumeji Takehisa, to the media at the museum in Okayama’s Naka Ward on Dec. 18, 2023. (Hiroshi Ono)
OKAYAMA--An oil painting by the artist Yumeji Takehisa that was thought lost until its recent discovery decades later will feature in a traveling exhibition starting in June in Tokyo before moving on to four other locations across Japan.
The work in question is “Amaryllis.” Takehisa died in 1934 at age 49. He was a leading painter and poet in the Taisho Romanticism movement known for his Nihonga illustrations of “bijin,” beautiful women and girls.
The artwork has been acquired by the Yumeji Art Museum in the city’s Naka Ward.
Measuring roughly 60 centimeters by 41 cm, the work depicts a seated woman dressed in kimono and a potted Amaryllis.
The museum refers to the painting as “Yumeji’s ‘Mona Lisa,’” a nod to the pose in Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.
The woman in the painting is believed to be Oyo, who was a professional model and later became Takehisa’s lover.
The painting was originally showcased at an exhibition held in Fukushima in 1919 before it was donated to the Kikufuji Hotel in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward, where the artist stayed between 1918 and 1921.
The piece went missing after the hotel was closed in 1944. In 2022, word emerged that the painting was in the possession of a Tokyo gallery, according to the museum.
The fact that only about 30 of Takehisa’s oil paintings are known to exist makes “Amaryllis” a rare work.
“It was drawn with techniques unique to oil painting to depict a ‘Yumeji-style beauty,’ and it can be said it is a representative work from his mid-career,” said Hiromi Kojima, acting director of the museum.
The special exhibition celebrating this year’s 140th anniversary of Takehisa’s birth will open at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum in June before taking place in Okayama in September and in Osaka in January 2025 and elsewhere.
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