Three pears and a branch of grapes on nothing — no table, no cloth, no shadow except a warm ochre glow where the fruit meets the paper. The outlines do all the work. Each pear is drawn with a single sure contour that swells and pinches in exactly the right places, the kind of line you can only make after you've drawn the same fruit a thousand times and stopped thinking about it. The grapes bunch together in a loose cluster, each one a little oval caught between stems. There's no color to speak of. Just ink, that gold wash, and the bare paper showing through.

This is a lithograph after an oil painting by Yasui Sotaro — one of the two most important Western-style painters in twentieth-century Japan. In 1952, the Emperor awarded him the Order of Culture, Japan's highest cultural honor. His "Portrait of Chin-Jung" hangs in the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and appeared on a Japanese postage stamp. His still lifes — especially the fruit and the roses — are the works that people come back to. He'd studied Cézanne in Paris for seven years, and you can see it here: the way the forms sit in space without quite touching the surface they're resting on, the way structure matters more than finish, the way a pear can carry as much weight as a portrait.

Yasui died in 1955. This lithograph was published in 1967 as part of an estate-authorized edition, numbered and stamped with his red chop mark in the lower left corner. Signed in pencil along the bottom margin. Edition of 200.

His still lifes — especially the fruit and the roses — are the works that people come back to.

Framed in a light wood frame with white mat. The paper carries a warm ivory tone — sixty years of quiet aging that suits the image perfectly.