Enoshima

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū in Kagawa, Enoshima (江之島図, c. 1873–1876) is one of Takahashi Yuichi's principal landscape oils of the early 1870s and a key painting in the small group of coastal views he produced after the Restoration. The long horizontal canvas shows the small sacred island of Enoshima on the Sagami Bay coast — long sacred to the goddess Benzaiten and a frequent destination of Edo pilgrimage — rising from a calm sea with its low pine-clad summit and the line of fishing boats drawn up on the sandbar that connects it to the mainland at low tide.

The painting is closer in temperament to a Northern European seventeenth-century view than to the Edo woodblock landscape tradition of Hokusai and Hiroshige that had treated the same subject, and it stands as one of Yuichi's earliest attempts to construct an indigenous oil-painting topography. Offered as a votive to Kotohira-gū in the late 1870s, the Enoshima is among the works that established the small marine view as a central genre of Meiji yōga and that documented Yuichi's working journeys along the Tōkaidō.