Sea Bream

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū in Kagawa, Sea Bream (鯛, 1879) is one of the most celebrated of Takahashi Yuichi's late-1870s still lifes and a key painting in the genre of Meiji oil still life that he effectively invented. The oil on canvas shows a large red sea bream (tai), the auspicious fish of Japanese celebration and the iconographic emblem of the deity Ebisu, lying full-length on a plain ground, its scales rendered in the patient, almost obsessive modulation of pink, vermilion and silver that distinguishes Yuichi's mature still-life technique. Beside it a smaller fish completes the composition.

The choice of subject is dense in cultural reference: the tai is the iconic offering of Japanese celebration and is invoked in the pun medetai (meaning 'auspicious'), and its depiction by Yuichi for a Shinto shrine — Kotohira-gū is dedicated to the protector of seafarers — is at once a fulfilment of the shrine's iconographic programme and a statement of the Meiji yōga painter's command of the indigenous symbolic vocabulary. The painting is among the works that travelled with the Konpira committee to the major Meiji exhibitions and that established Kotohira-gū itself as the central patron of nineteenth-century Japanese oil painting.