Cats

Held in the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art in Ibaraki, Cats (猫図) is a small, intimate oil on canvas in which Takahashi Yuichi turned the European still-life manner to the description of the most familiar of domestic animals. The painting shows a cat in three-quarter view, its fur rendered in the patient tonal modulation that Yuichi had developed for the cured-fish and kitchen still lifes of the late 1870s, and its eyes given the careful directional gaze of a European animal study. The composition is rigorously frontal and the ground intentionally plain, with the modelling concentrated on the body of the cat itself.

The painting belongs to the small group of animal subjects that Yuichi produced through the 1880s, and it stands in a productive dialogue with the cat paintings of his Edo predecessors — the playful, calligraphic cats of Kuniyoshi and Hokusai — while taking them into the new register of oil-medium illusionism. The Kasama Nichido Museum holds the most important regional collection of Meiji-period oil painting in Japan, and the Cats is among the works that document Yuichi's quiet expansion of the Meiji still-life genre into the affectionate observation of the domestic.