Takahashi Yuichi

Takahashi Yuichi (高橋由一, 1828–1894) was the first major Japanese oil painter and a pioneering figure of Meiji yōga (Western-style painting). Trained as a Kanō-school painter in the closing decades of the Edo period and already about forty years old at the time of the 1868 Restoration, he is the rare bridge artist whose career carries the 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, held in the University Art Museum of the Tokyo University of the Arts, is designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan and is perhaps the best-known image of nineteenth-century Japanese oil painting; the Bijin (Oiran, or Courtesan) of 1872, likewise an Important Cultural Property, and his long series of food still lifes, landscapes and portraits together constitute a foundational corpus of yōga.

Yuichi was born in Edo in 1828, the son of Takahashi Genjūrō, a samurai retainer of the Sano domain (a subsidiary of the Hotta clan's Sakura domain, in present-day Tochigi prefecture). As a boy he was apprenticed in the Kanō school and seemed destined for a routine career as a domain painter. The turning point came when he encountered Western lithographs and was overwhelmed by the illusionistic depth and tonal modelling of the European mode. Around 1862 he entered the shogunate's institute for Western studies (the Bansho Shirabesho), where he trained in Western drawing under Kawakami Tōgai; and in 1866 he began studying oil painting under the British illustrator Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), the Yokohama-based correspondent of the Illustrated London News, who had settled in Japan in 1861.

Yuichi's earliest known oils — including a self-portrait and studies of foreign visitors and Yokohama subjects — date from the late 1860s and are among the first serious attempts by a Japanese artist to work in the European oil medium. After the Restoration he settled in Tokyo, and in June 1873 he opened the private Western-painting school Tenkaisha (天絵社; later renamed Tenkai Gakusha), one of the first schools of its kind in Japan. Among its students were Harada Naojirō, Andō Chūtarō, and Yuichi's own son Genkichi. The school helped establish the basic genres of yōga — official portraits in oil, urban landscape views, and meticulously rendered food and object still lifes — that would shape Japanese oil painting through the 1880s.

One of the largest concentrations of his work is at Kotohira-gū (the Konpira shrine) on Mount Zōzu in Kagawa prefecture, on Shikoku, to which around 1879–1881 he donated a major series of oil paintings as votive offerings; these still lifes of tofu, cod, sea bream and shellfish, together with coastal landscape views, are now displayed in a dedicated hall on the shrine precinct. This body of work was a practical financial foundation of his late career and is among the most extensive surviving groups of Meiji-period oil painting by a single artist.

Yuichi also pursued a sustained campaign of advocacy for Western painting through travel and commissioned work. In 1881, at the invitation of the Yamagata-prefecture governor Mishima Michitsune, he undertook a series of views of the prefecture's new roads, bridges and public works. He worked under government commission as a portraitist as well: in 1879 he was recommended by the Genrōin as a court painter and was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Emperor Meiji.

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 many of the institutional, pedagogic and economic structures — the private school, the government commission, the shrine votive series, the travelling sketching journey — through which Japanese oil painting would develop. He died in Tokyo on 6 July 1894. The principal holdings of his work are at the University Art Museum of the Tokyo University of the Arts and at Kotohira-gū.