Tofu

Held in the Takahashi Yuichi-kan museum at Kotohira-gū in Kagawa prefecture, Tofu (豆腐, July 1876) is one of the earliest and most affectionate of Takahashi Yuichi's still lifes of Japanese kitchen subjects. The small horizontal oil on canvas (approximately 30 by 43 cm) shows three forms of soybean food laid out on a plain wooden surface: a block of fresh white tofu on the left, a roll of yuba (the protein-rich skin skimmed from heated soy milk) in the centre, and a piece of grilled yaki-dōfu with its scorched golden-brown crust on the right. The composition is rigorously frontal and the lighting almost shadowless, with each object weighed and rendered with the patient curiosity of a painter who is at once a Confucian-trained Edo intellectual and a student of European illusionism.

Tofu belongs to the Kotohira-gū votive series — the more than thirty oils that Yuichi produced for the Konpira shrine between 1877 and 1881 — and is among the works that established the Meiji still life as an indigenous genre. Where the Salmon turned a single dried fish into a hieratic vertical icon, the Tofu does the opposite: it presents the most ordinary, plain and white of Japanese foodstuffs in a flat, contemplative arrangement, and the painting has been read in modern Yuichi scholarship as the inaugural masterpiece of the Meiji food still life — a genre that would survive, through Asai Chū and the Tenkaisha lineage, well into twentieth-century Japanese oil painting.