Takahashi Yuichi

Takahashi Yuichi (高橋由一, 1828–1894) was the first major Japanese oil painter and the pioneering figure of Meiji yōga (Western-style painting). Trained as a Kanō-school painter in the closing decades of the Edo period and almost forty years old at the time of the 1868 Restoration, he is the rare bridge artist whose career carries the entire weight of Japan's transition from brush-and-ink convention to European pictorial realism. His most famous painting, the hanging Salmon (鮭) of about 1877 in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, is designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan and is the single most reproduced image of nineteenth-century Japanese oil painting; the Bijin (Oiran) of 1872, the Tofu of 1876, and the long series of food still lifes, landscapes and portraits commissioned by Kotohira-gū (Konpira shrine) in Sanuki together constitute the foundational corpus of yōga.

Yuichi was born in Edo on 28 February 1828, the eldest son of a low-ranking samurai of the Sano domain (present-day Tochigi prefecture) named Takahashi Genjūrō. As a boy he was apprenticed in the Kanō school under Kanō Tōkō (狩野董江) and seemed destined for a routine career as a domain painter. The turning point came in his late twenties, when he saw a Western lithograph — by his own later account, a foreign book illustration — and was overwhelmed by the illusionistic depth and tonal modelling of the Western mode. From around 1862 he attended the Bansho Shirabesho (the shogunate's institute for the investigation of barbarian writings), and from 1865 he studied Western drawing and watercolour under Kawakami Tōgai (1828–1881), the foundational teacher of Meiji yōga and a near-exact contemporary. In 1866 he became a student of the British illustrator and Yokohama-based reporter Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), who had arrived in Japan in 1861 as correspondent for the Illustrated London News and ran an informal studio teaching oil technique in Yokohama; Wirgman supplied Yuichi with imported oil paints and instruction in their handling, and the two remained close until Wirgman's death.

Yuichi's earliest known oils — the Self-Portrait with Topknot (丁髷姿の自画像) in the Kasama Nichido Museum and a small number of studies of foreign visitors and Yokohama subjects — date from the late 1860s and constitute the first attempts by a Japanese artist to work seriously in the European oil medium. After the Restoration he moved to Tokyo and in 1873 founded the private school Tenkai-rō (天絵楼), later renamed Tenkaisha (天絵社), the first dedicated Western-painting academy in Japan; among its students were Asai Chū, Honda Kinkichirō, Kawamura Kiyoo and Yuichi's own son Genkichi (源吉). The school was financed largely by Yuichi's relentless campaign of commissions from the new Meiji government, regional governors, military men, businessmen, and shrines, and the Tenkaisha corpus established the basic genres of yōga — official portraits in oil, urban landscape views, narrative history paintings of indigenous subject matter, and meticulously rendered food and object still lifes — that would dominate Japanese oil painting through the 1880s.

The single largest concentration of his work is at Kotohira-gū, the great Shinto shrine on Mount Zōzu in Sanuki (present-day Kagawa prefecture), which between 1877 and 1881 commissioned more than thirty oils from Yuichi as votive offerings (hōnō). The Kotohira series — now housed in the dedicated Takahashi Yuichi-kan museum on the shrine precinct — includes the Tofu of 1876, the Cod and Plum Blossoms and Sunset at Shibaura of 1877, the Sea Bream, Shells and Cherry Blossoms of 1879, and the matched landscape views of Mount Fuji from Tago, Enoshima, and other coastal subjects sketched during Yuichi's travels along the Tōkaidō. The Kotohira commission was the practical financial foundation of his late career and is the most extensive surviving body of Meiji-period oil painting in Japan from any single artist.

At the same time, Yuichi conducted a sustained campaign of advocacy for Western painting through travel and self-publication. In 1876 he made a long sketching journey through Tōhoku at the invitation of Yamagata-prefecture governor Mishima Michitsune, producing the Yamagata views including Tokiwa Bridge over the Su River (now in the Yamagata Prefectural Library) and the Mount Chōkai views; the trip was followed by the publication of his lithographic albums of Yamagata scenery. In 1877 his Salmon was shown at the First National Industrial Exhibition in Ueno (the same exhibition at which Hashimoto Gahō and Kanō Hōgai represented the indigenous school), and in 1879 he produced the celebrated Moonlit Night in Nakasu now at the Utsunomiya Museum of Art. From 1880 he also worked under government commission painting portraits of the Meiji oligarchs and military leaders — including the surviving portraits of Emperor Meiji, the Confucian reformer Uesugi Yōzan, and the Western-learning scholar Nishi Amane (1893) — and the late 1880s saw a final series of Buddhist subjects including the Yamato Takeru (日本武尊) now at Geidai and the Nyoirindō icon in the Tokyo National Museum.

Yuichi remained essentially self-taught in European technique throughout his career and was always conscious of his limitations relative to the Paris-trained painters of the following generation, but his historical importance is unmatched: he was the painter who first proved that the European oil medium could be brought into productive contact with Japanese subjects, and he established the institutional, pedagogic and economic structures — the private school, the government commission, the shrine votive series, the travelling sketching journey, the published album — through which Japanese oil painting would develop. His son Genkichi continued the Tenkaisha until the end of the Meiji period. Yuichi died at his Tokyo home on 6 July 1894, three weeks before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. The principal holdings of his work are at the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū, the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, the Yamagata Museum of Art, the Yamagata Prefectural Library, the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, the Tokyo National Museum, and a small group in regional museums of Tochigi prefecture, his ancestral homeland. The systematic Geidai centenary catalogue of 1994 and the major 2012 retrospective at MOMAT and the Kyoto National Museum together established the current scholarly understanding of his career and confirmed his standing as the founding figure of Japanese oil painting.