Cod and Plum Blossoms

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū, Kagawa prefecture, Cod and Plum Blossoms (鱈梅花図, 1877) belongs with the Salmon to the small group of late 1870s still lifes in which Takahashi Yuichi turned the European oil medium to the description of preserved fish, the staple winter protein of Edo and early Meiji urban life. The oil on canvas shows the dressed, salted carcass of a Pacific cod (tara) laid along the lower half of the picture, its silvered belly and dark dorsal back rendered in the careful tonal modelling that Yuichi had learned from Charles Wirgman; behind it a flowering branch of plum (ume), the first blossom of the lunar new year, is set against a dark, indeterminate ground.

The pairing is iconographically traditional — the cod and plum blossom together evoke the New Year season in Japanese kitchen poetry — but the rendering is unprecedented in Japanese painting up to that point. Where a Kanō- or Rinpa-school painter would have placed the same subject in a calligraphic, decorative composition, Yuichi locates it on a horizontal still-life ground in the manner of the European market scene and weighs every reflection of light against the dark backdrop. The painting was offered as a votive (hōnō) to Kotohira-gū in 1877 and is one of the works that consolidated Yuichi's standing with the shrine that would sustain his practice through the late 1870s and 1880s.