An Apple Exists on Top of a Pot
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo |
| Location History: | An Apple Exists on Top of a Pot (1916) was first exhibited at the 3rd Sōdōsha Exhibition at the Akasaka Tameike San Kaidō in Tokyo in November 1916, and was subsequently shown at the Sōdōsha Nagoya Exhibition at the Aichi Product Exhibition Hall in February 1917. It was then included in the 10th-anniversary Shirakaba exhibition of Kishida Ryūsei’s works in Tokyo in April 1919, followed by the Shibakawa Terukichi collection exhibition at Shibakawa’s residence in Tokyo in December 1921. The work later appeared in the 1943 Kishida Ryūsei 15th Anniversary Oil Painting and Drawing Retrospective at the Nihon Gakki Gallery, Tokyo. Its present institutional history begins in 1983, when it was transferred from the Agency for Cultural Affairs to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), where it remains in the collection as accession no. O00857. |
The painting is a still life, consisting of a single apple carefully balanced on top of a rounded pot. Kishida deliberately reduces the composition to a few ordinary objects, allowing their material presence, volume and surface texture to become the central focus. The frontal arrangement and relatively shallow space give the objects an almost monumental quality despite their small scale. The work is particularly significant because it belongs to a crucial period in Kishida’s development, when he was questioning the direction of modern Japanese painting. Around 1916, he became deeply interested in European Old Masters, particularly Albrecht Durer and Jan van Eyck, whose precise observation and meticulous rendering influenced his approach to realism. The painting demonstrates Kishida's attempt to reconcile Western oil painting realism with his own Japanese artistic context. Its emphasis on close observation and tangible reality represents an important moment in the emergence of modern Japanese realist still life painting. The work was exhibited at the third Sodosha exhibition in Tokyo in November 1916, shortly after its completion on November 3.