Sakamoto Hanjiro, painter of many horses, cows, Noh masks, and moons, was the elementary school substitute teacher from whom Ishibashi Shojiro first learned about art, and later urged him to collect the work of Aoki Shigeru. He studied in Paris in 1921, at age 39, changing from the Impressionist style, emphasizing brush marks, to a more decorative style with simplified subjects and the use of color planes in pale hues. Returning to Japan in 1924, he went straight to his home in Kurume, where his family awaited him. In 1931, he moved to Yame and built an atelier that, like his lodging in Paris, had windows up to the ceiling.
He painted this work in that new atelier. The three horses face forward, to the side, and to the rear. Their bodies gleaming in the sunlight are also depicted from front, side, and rear. The emerald green he used for the eyes of the horse in the center is also the base color for the horses’ bodies and legs, the sky, the ground, and the trees in the background, pulling the entire picture plane together.
A friend’s commission for a horse painting was the trigger for his many paintings of horses. Fascinated by their lively appearance outdoors in the rich natural beauty of Kyushu, he would go visit pastures and horse markets in search of horses that appealed to him.
Immediately after Sakamoto showed this painting at the nineteenth Nika Exhibition, Shojiro purchased it. Later Sakamoto himself altered it twice when visiting the Ishibashi Museum of Art (now the Kurume City Museum).