Sunset at Shibaura

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan at Kotohira-gū in Kagawa prefecture, Sunset at Shibaura (芝浦夕陽, 1877) is among the most lyric of Takahashi Yuichi's landscape oils and a key painting for understanding his treatment of urban Tokyo in the years immediately following the Restoration. The horizontal canvas shows the broad expanse of Tokyo Bay seen from the Shibaura embankment to the south of central Edo, with the sky given to the long horizontal bands of red and lavender of a Pacific sunset and the foreground occupied by the shadowed silhouettes of small fishing vessels and the line of low shore.

Shibaura was at this date the rapidly modernising southern waterfront of the city, with steamships moored alongside traditional sailing vessels and the new railway terminus at Shinbashi nearby, and the painting documents the precise historical moment in which old Edo was being absorbed into modern Tokyo. The composition recalls the long horizontal compositions of the European port view — Yuichi knew the work of the Dutch and English marine painters through imported lithographs — and is among the works in which the Meiji yōga painter brought the new oil medium to the description of the modernising city. It was offered as a votive to Kotohira-gū in 1877 and is among the works in the great Konpira series of 1877–1881.