Salmon

Designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan and held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, Takahashi Yuichi's Salmon (鮭, c. 1877) is the most celebrated work of nineteenth-century Japanese oil painting and the single most reproduced image of Meiji yōga. The tall vertical oil on paper (140 by 46.5 cm) depicts a salmon split open down its belly and suspended by a length of straw rope from a hook at the top of the picture, the head wrapped in straw cord and the salt-cured red flesh exposed in a long vertical band against the bare ground of the paper. The painting answers a problem internal to the introduction of oil painting into Japan: the European still-life tradition required a culturally specific iconography that did not exist for the Japanese painter, and Yuichi's solution was to take a single, immediately recognisable object from Japanese kitchen life — the dried, salted salmon hung in the eaves to age — and to give it the full weight of European illusionism and tonal modelling.

The Salmon belongs to a small group of cured-fish paintings that Yuichi produced in the late 1870s for exhibition and for the Kotohira-gū votive series, and it occupies the central place in the iconography of Meiji yōga as the moment at which oil paint was first turned to the description of indigenous everyday matter. It was shown at the First National Industrial Exhibition in Ueno in 1877, where it was awarded a prize, and it has been read continuously since the early twentieth century as both a foundational document of modern Japanese realism and an emblem of the Meiji project of cultural assimilation. The work was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1967.