Mount Fuji Seen from Tago

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū in Kagawa, Mount Fuji Seen from Tago (田子富士, c. 1873–1876) is one of Takahashi Yuichi's principal landscape statements and a key painting for understanding the way the first Japanese oil painter handled the most iconic of Japanese subjects. The oil on canvas shows Mount Fuji rising in the distance from the curve of Tago Bay on the Suruga coast, the snow-capped cone set against a clear sky and the foreground given over to the long sand spit, the small boats and the line of fishermen's huts of the bay. The composition is closer in temperament to a Dutch seventeenth-century seascape than to a Hokusai woodblock view, and the painting documents Yuichi's working position on the Tōkaidō during his sketching journeys of the early 1870s.