French Landscape Ⅱ

Saito graduated in Western painting from Tokyo School of Fine Arts. He went to Paris in 1906 and returned to Japan having studied Neo-Impressionism and other trends. He conveyed this new tendency to the Bunten and Nikakai of the time. He traveled to France again in 1920 and settled there. Though he did not leave so many works throughout his lifetime, he is known for his vivid pointillist works, which reach a high degree of perfection.

Saito was enchanted by the brilliant style of the French pointillists and adopted this tendency in his own works from an early stage to introduce it to the Japanese art circles. This painting appears to be a landscape in Brittany and depicts a lane glittering in the early afternoon. By painting touches of yellow and vermilion on top of one another, the real landscape is reinterpreted as a symphony of gleaming colors. Saito’s pointillism expresses the poetic sentiment of nature in bright colored dots. This is slightly different from the French Neo-Impressionist works by artists such as Seurat and Signac, who divided the colors meticulously according to scientific color theory. The color sense Saito, who was acclaimed as “the flower of Nikakai,” possessed is also evident in his later pastels in which subtle neutral colors are applied on top of each other.