Cherry Blossoms

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū in Kagawa, Cherry Blossoms (桜花図, 1879) is one of the few floral subjects in Takahashi Yuichi's surviving corpus and a key work for understanding the way the Meiji yōga painter handled subjects that had been central to Japanese painting for a millennium. The oil on canvas shows a branch of flowering cherry against a quiet, indeterminate ground, with the cluster of soft pink and white blossoms rendered in the patient modulation of tone that Yuichi had developed for his still lifes of cured fish and kitchen objects. The composition is rigorously frontal, almost botanical, and is closer in temperament to a European study from nature than to the curving, decorative compositions of cherry blossoms in the Kanō or Rinpa traditions.