Western lamps and jar

A still life of imported domestic objects — kerosene or oil lamps with their tall glass chimneys alongside a ceramic jar — staged against a flat colored ground. Kawakami built much of his career around the theme of Western things absorbed into Japanese life, treating items like lamps, bottles, eyeglasses, and steam locomotives as decorative motifs rather than realistic subjects. The composition flattens the objects into silhouette, with the lamp glasses rendered as transparent rectangles and the jar as a simple curving outline. As mokuhanga produced under the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) ethos, the print would have been carved and printed by Kawakami himself, with deliberately rough register and visible woodgrain rather than the seamless polish of commercial [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e). Such still lifes connect his work to the [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) tradition of the Bakumatsu period, when [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) artists first depicted Western imports as curiosities for a domestic audience.