I found this painting on display at the National Portrait Gallery quite interesting, especially after having lived in Japan for seven years and being a fan of Hokusai’s woodblock prints.

The painting takes as its source Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Shimomura presents himself in the guise of America’s Founding Father; he replaces George Washington’s colonial troops with samurai warriors; and he remakes the body of water they cross to resemble San Francisco Bay with Angel Island (the processing center for Asian immigrants) in the background. The work echoes the compositional format of a Hokusai woodblock print.

As an artist, Roger Shimomura has focused particular attention on the experiences of Asian Americans and the challenges of being “different” in America, having been relocated with his family from their home in Seattle to a Japanese American internment camp in Idaho during WWII. The painting started with the thought, “What if George Washington were Japanese American?” and ended as one of his most famous works to date.

Best to view in "Original" because other versions resized by Pbase are decidedly unsharp.

‘I was just leaving,’ posted earlier