In Playful Cat, Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita painted a feline engaged in play with a butterfly flying overhead. The vermilion “right-hand stamp” impressed on the painting suggests that he created this painting during his time in Japan from 1935 to 1938. After his return to Japan from France, Foujita became a member of the Nika-kai art association and once again worked in nihonga, or Japanese-style paintings. During this period, he used the “right-hand stamp” as his signature on his nihonga.

In his earlier nihonga piece from 1912, entitled Horse Marketplace in Kiso Fukushima Village, he signed the work with the phonetic alphabet “ta” within the simplified drawing for mountain, which likely represents his last name along with Mount Fuji (a homophone for wisteria, fuji) and ta (for the character for “field”). This demonstrates that the artist had been considering a signature for his Japanese works from an early stage in his career. His signature “嗣治 (Tsuguharu in kanji character) Foujita” and the execution year “1932 ” appeared vertically and in parallel, when he transitioned to oil painting in France. Following his Catholic baptism in 1957, he began signing his works “Léonard Foujita.”

Starting in 1934, however, some of his drawings on paper began to include the characters for “Foujita” enclosed in a square. Around 1935, he began to use his vermillion “right-hand stamp” exclusively on his nihonga-like ink paintings mounted as hanging scrolls.

While Foujita had previously depicted cats standing still or sleeping, from around 1932, he began to portray them in more dynamic movements, such as cats leaping. During a trip to Central and South America in 1932, Fujita painted Three Cats Stealing Fish (National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires), capturing cats spring up into the air to catch their prey. In 1940, Fujita exhibited Struggle, which depicted fourteen cats and was later renamed Cats (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). Let’s now identify the feline in Playful Cat among the cats in Struggle/Cats. Playful Cat has darker fur from the back to the upper part of its right paw and vertical wrinkles very top of its head. Its body displays a pattern of horizontal rings that extends to the tip of its tail. In Struggle/Cats, Playful Cat appears in three places: first, as Cat 1 in the lower part of the painting, targeting the upper left; next, directly above as Cat 2, showing its belly and looking straight at the viewer; and finally, as Cat 3, showing its fangs, to the left of cat 1. Perhaps Foujita became so fascinated by his cats with “wonderful milk-white” fur that he could not stop painting them, shifting his interest from naked women.

Leonard-Tsuguharu Foujita (painter; 1886–1968)
Yoga painter from Tokyo. After graduating from Tokyo Fine Arts School, Foujita moved to France where he created the signature “milk-white” skin with delicate lines, earning him high recognition in the Paris art world. He returned to Japan temporarily and was recommended as a member of Nika-kai art association and the Japan Art Academy. After the World War II, he acquired French nationality by naturalization, baptized and changed his name to Léonard Foujita. He was awarded the Asahi Prize and received the Legion of Honor.