Belgian Girl in Kimono

The girl wears a long-sleeved kimono with white and purple flowers scattered on a red ground and a wide yellow obi. A large red ribbon is tied in her hair, and she looks straight out at the viewer. On a shelf at the right stand Japanese ceramics and dolls, and outside the window at the left a green hedge can be seen.

The kimono pattern is not painted flower by flower but expressed as planes of color built from layered short brushstrokes. Strong colors such as red, purple and yellow fill the picture, but the white light from the window keeps the whole bright. The combination of a European girl, a Japanese kimono and Japanese crafts arranged in the room is the subject of the painting.

Kojima Torajiro was a Western-style painter from Okayama Prefecture. With the support of Ohara Magosaburo he went to Europe and, from 1909, studied at the art academy in Ghent, Belgium. This work, painted in 1911 during that stay in Belgium, is one of his representative works.

Alongside his own painting, Kojima devoted himself to collecting Western art for Ohara. He died in 1929 at the age of forty-seven, and the following year, 1930, Ohara opened the Ohara Museum of Art to show the works Kojima had collected together with Kojima's own works.