Portrait of a Japanese Woman (Mrs. Kuroki)

Portrait of a Japanese Woman (Mrs. Kuroki), dated 1922, reflects one of the more distinctive episodes in Aman-Jean's later career: his visit to Japan in 1922, where he was received as a prominent European artist and produced a series of portraits of Japanese sitters. Mrs. Kuroki was presumably the wife of a cultivated Japanese patron or official who arranged for Aman-Jean's reception. This cross-cultural portrait encounter placed Aman-Jean in an interesting position: his Symbolist atmospheric aesthetic, which had always incorporated japoniste influence through the broader Parisian absorption of Japanese aesthetics, was now brought into direct contact with Japanese subjects. The painting now resides in the Matsukata Collection, named after Kojiro Matsukata, the Japanese industrialist and art collector who assembled one of the most important collections of European art in Japan before World War II, much of which eventually became the core of the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

Canvas from Aman-Jean's Japan period, where his characteristic atmospheric softness acquires a new dimension in dialogue with the Japanese aesthetic traditions that had partly inspired it. The figure's kimono, with its flat decorative surface patterning, presented both a compositional challenge and an opportunity for his interest in the boundaries between figure and decorative ground.