Moonlit Night in Nakasu

Held in the Utsunomiya Museum of Art in Tochigi prefecture, Moonlit Night in Nakasu (中洲月夜の図, 1878) is among the most atmospheric of Takahashi Yuichi's landscape oils and one of his most accomplished night scenes. The horizontal canvas shows the Nakasu sandbar in the Sumida River near central Tokyo — the small island in midstream long associated with riverside pleasure houses, with restaurants and with the geisha and boatmen of the lower town — bathed in the soft, cold light of a high moon. The dark river runs across the foreground, the sandbar with its low buildings occupies the middle distance, and the moon rises in a quiet, indeterminate sky.

The painting is among the works in which Yuichi tested the European nocturne against the long tradition of Japanese moon-viewing painting, and the result is a lyric, almost melancholic image of the modernising city by night. The Utsunomiya Museum of Art holds an important collection of Meiji oil painting drawn from Yuichi's native Tochigi prefecture, and the Moonlit Night in Nakasu is among the works that document his contribution to the establishment of the night view as a genre of Japanese oil painting.