In Jazz Age Paris, Léonard‑Tsuguharu Foujita was a star. He cut a dandyish figure on the Montparnasse scene and counted Modigliani among his peers. His first solo exhibition in the city sold out; Picasso, one of the first to visit, is said to have left the gallery with as many works as he could carry.
After making his name with the École de Paris in the 1920s, Foujita returned to Japan in the following decade and became an official war painter, producing works that supported the country’s military campaigns. When he reached New York in 1949, he was trying to rebuild his life and reputation in the long shadow of postwar criticism.
This autumn, Sotheby’s Hong Kong will stage The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection, the house’s first dedicated single-artist auction in Asia. Estimated at HK$17.8 million to HK$26.5 million (US$2.3-3.45 million), the 15-lot sale traces six decades of Foujita’s remarkable career – from the Montparnasse self-image of Mon portrait and the nudes and cats on his signature “milky-white” ground to the postwar dream-world of Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine).
The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection will be at Sotheby's Hong Kong this September
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita | Mon portrait, watercolour and pen and ink on silk
Executed in 1924
44.5 x 31.5 cm
Estimate: HK$800,000 - 1,200,000
Painted in 1924, Mon portrait captures Foujita at the height of his Parisian fame. Seated at his desk among carefully chosen objects, he presents himself as a Japanese artist entirely at ease in Europe.
Born in Tokyo in 1886, Foujita was the son of a general in Japan’s imperial army and grew up in an aristocratic family. France had fascinated him since childhood. He took French lessons as a boy and, after graduating from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts, left for Paris in 1913. In an early letter home, he wrote to his father: “Consider me dead until I become famous.”
Foujita slipped quickly into the life of the Parisian avant-garde. Settling in Montparnasse, he threw lavish parties and made an entrance in his signature look of round tortoiseshell glasses, a neat bowl haircut, and large gold earrings. Friends called him “Fou Fou” – “slightly crazy” in French – and on one occasion he even turned up at the opera in a lampshade, claiming it was standard headwear in Japan.
Before long, Foujita had become one of Montparnasse’s most recognisable figures, moving in the same circles as Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall. Behind the flamboyant persona he worked obsessively, sleeping only a few hours a night. While absorbing the art around him, he signed up as a copyist at the Louvre, where antiquities and Old Masters pushed him to rethink his own painting and begin forging a language between Western art and Japanese tradition.
Foujita was one of the most recognisable figures in Paris in the 1920s
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita | Nuassoupi sur la table, oil on canvas
Executed in 1927
98.6 x 80.3 cm
Estimate: HK$2,000,000 - 3,000,000 (US$260,000 - 390,000)
By the 1920s, Foujita had arrived at his signature style. At a time when French audiences often regarded Japanese artists’ attempts at Western painting as inauthentic, he found a way to work within European genres while satisfying the public’s taste for Japonisme.
His canvases combined oil paint with the restraint and precision of traditional Japanese painting, sometimes incorporating touches of sumi ink. Using an ultra-fine menso brush, he drew hair-thin contour lines reminiscent of ukiyo-e woodcuts, then built up the image with delicate layers of translucent oil.
Where the prevailing taste ran to strong colour and heavy texture, he set himself apart with his secret grand fond blanc: a milky-white ground that gave his paintings a pearly luminescence unlike anything Western viewers had seen. Made from a closely guarded recipe of flaxseed oil, crushed chalk, and silicate powders, this surface allowed his delicate lines to glide without bleeding, while lending skin and fur their distinctive porcelain-like sheen.
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita | Madeleine endormie, pen and ink, ink wash and watercolour on paper
Executed in 1933
33 x 41 cm
Estimate: HK$300,000 - 500,000 (US$39,000 - 65,000)
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita | Chatte et chaton, oil, pen and ink on canvas
Executed in 1932
46 x 55 cm
Estimate: HK$2,000,000 - 3,000,000 (US$260,000 - 390,000)
Foujita became the toast of the art world in Roaring Twenties Paris. Critics praised him, collectors paid fortunes for his drawings, watercolours and oils, and at the height of his fame department stores even dressed mannequins in his image to sell clothes.
His most renowned subjects were female nudes and cats. He adored felines, long associated in Japan with good fortune, and was captivated by their mixture of domesticity and wildness. The strays he kept in his studio became his favourite companions and muses, appearing throughout his work: alone, in groups, beside his models, and in his self-portraits.
His work sold as fast as he made it. Money poured in, and he spent it freely. But after the stock market crash of 1929, many of his wealthy clients left Paris. By the early 1930s, weighed down by a massive tax burden and romantic turmoil, he left the city behind and began decades of restless travel.
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita | Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine), oil and ink on canvas
Executed in New York in 1949
76.7 x 64 cm
Estimate: HK$4,000,000 - 6,000,000 (US$520,000 - 780,000)
Painted in New York in 1949, Le rêve (Hommage à La Fontaine) marks a turning point in Foujita's life. After travelling through Latin America and returning to Japan, he spent the Second World War as an official painter to the Imperial Army, only to face accusations of collaboration after the surrender. On 10 March 1949, he left Japan for good, boarding a plane for New York.
Though intended only as a stopover before Paris, the city gave Foujita the freedom to begin again. “I am finally a bird that has the sky all to himself,” he wrote that April. While awaiting his French visa, the sixty-three-year-old artist threw himself into New York: walking its streets in denim overalls, visiting the zoo and the American Museum of Natural History, and observing life in all its forms.
The fables of Jean de La Fontaine, which he had loved since his earliest Paris years, now took on new meaning. “A reaction to violent times,” he later observed, “I conjured the sweetest of subjects, even childish subjects.” Le rêve draws specifically on Le Songe d’un habitant du Mogol, in which a man dreams that a worldly vizier has entered paradise while a pious hermit burns in hell. A sage explains that the vizier had secretly longed for solitude, while the hermit had craved life at court.
In Foujita's painting, a fox lies undisturbed beneath a small painting-within-a-painting – his adaptation of Millet’s Gust of Wind, where a fox replaces the peasant battered by the storm. The tempest rages inside the frame; outside it, the father fox sleeps on, watched quietly by his mate and cubs. The scene’s tenderness echoes Foujita’s own dream of reunion with his wife, to whom he wrote constantly, once sketching himself asleep, dreaming of her arrival.
Foujita and his wife in 1950
Close-up of Le rêve
Close-up of Le rêve
(Left) Close-up of Le rêve | (Right): Jean-François Millet, Gust of Wind, Collection of National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff
The work belongs to a small group of six known paintings of Hommage à La Fontaine made during his ten-month American sojourn of 1949-50. Four remain in Japanese institutional collections; another, La fête d'anniversaire, set the artist's auction record at £7 million in 2018 at Bonhams London.
Le rêve was shown that November at the Mathias Komor Gallery in Manhattan, the solo exhibition that announced Foujita's return to the international art world. The New York Times called it one of the brightest shows of the year. "Life has become beautiful again," Foujita wrote during the opening week.
The French visas arrived not long after the exhibition closed, and he sailed for Paris with his wife, hoping to "leave behind immortal masterpieces." Foujita acquired French nationality in 1955 and converted to Catholicism in 1959. He spent his final years painting frescoes for a Romanesque chapel in Reims, and died in 1968, shortly after its official opening.
Foujita’s market gained fresh momentum in the late 1980s, when Japanese collectors began acquiring his work in earnest amid Japan’s dominance of the Impressionist and Modern market. Today, demand remains strongly anchored in Asia, where five of his top ten auction results have been achieved.
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita, La Fête D'Anniversaire (1949) | Sold: £7,096,250
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita, Classe de chats (1949) | Collection of the Karuizawa Ando Museum
Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita, Homage to La Fontaine (1949) | Collection of the Pola Museum of Art, Hakone
Auction Details:
Auction House: Sotheby's Hong Kong
Sale: The Foujita Lexicon: Works from the Lewis Collection
Date: 28 September 2026
Number of Lots: 15