Self-Portrait with Topknot

Held in the Kasama Nichido Museum of Art in Ibaraki, Self-Portrait with Topknot (丁髷姿の自画像) is among the earliest surviving oils by Takahashi Yuichi and one of the foundational documents of Japanese oil portraiture. The small canvas shows the painter in three-quarter view, looking directly at the viewer with the still-knotted chonmage of late Edo and Bakumatsu-period samurai — the male hairstyle that would be abolished by edict in 1871 — modelled in the careful tonal handling that Yuichi had absorbed from Charles Wirgman in Yokohama and from the imported lithographs he had studied at the Bansho Shirabesho.

The painting is the principal autobiographical statement of the founder of Meiji yōga and a key visual document of the moment of transition. Yuichi was already in his late thirties when he made it, and the canvas shows a man at the boundary between two worlds — the Edo of his Kanō training and the Tokyo of the Tenkaisha school he would soon establish — held in the new medium of European oil. The Kasama Nichido Museum holds the most important regional collection of Meiji oil portraiture, and the Self-Portrait with Topknot is among its central works.