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.

The view of Fuji from Tago has been a canonical subject of Japanese landscape since the Manyōshū poem of Yamabe no Akahito in the eighth century and is the locus classicus of the Suruga prospect, and Yuichi's choice of the subject is a deliberate placement of the Meiji oil tradition into the longest line of Japanese topographic poetry. The painting was offered as a votive to Kotohira-gū in the late 1870s and is among the works in which Yuichi attempted to extend the new oil medium to the canonical sites of Japanese landscape feeling.