Prince Yamato Takeru

Held in the University Art Museum of Tokyo University of the Arts, Yamato Takeru (日本武尊) is among Takahashi Yuichi's late mythological canvases and one of the principal works in his small group of historical-narrative oils of the 1880s and early 1890s. The painting shows the legendary Yamato prince Yamato Takeru — the warrior hero of the early-mythological cycle recorded in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, son of the Emperor Keikō and conqueror of the eastern barbarians — in heroic standing pose, the imperial Kusanagi sword at his side and the dark, mountainous landscape behind him.

The choice of subject is characteristic of the late Meiji effort to construct a visual canon of Japanese mythological history comparable to the Greek and biblical canons of European academic painting, and Yuichi's treatment is among the earliest oils to attempt this synthesis. Where the slightly later mythological paintings of Aoki Shigeru and his contemporaries would draw on Pre-Raphaelite and symbolist sources, Yuichi's Yamato Takeru holds to the academic mode of historical portraiture that he had developed in his official portraits of Meiji-period figures, and the painting documents the work of the founder of yōga during the final years of his career, before his death in 1894.