Takahashi Yuichi

▪ Japanese artist

born March 20, 1828, Edo [now Tokyo], Japan

died July 6, 1894, Tokyo

      Japanese Western-style painter active in the late Tokugawa and Meiji periods.

      The son of a martial-arts teacher, Takahashi studied the traditional Japanese painting of the Kanō school but, impressed by some Western lithographs that he saw, turned to a Western-style realism. He entered the Western Culture Research Institute, studied Western painting under Kawakami Tōgai, and also received technical guidance from an Englishman, Charles Wirgman, who lived in Yokohama.

      Takahashi often painted familiar objects in everyday life and showed a superb talent in depicting still lifes with vivid realism. In 1870 he became a professor at Daigaku University, but in 1873 he founded his own private Western-oriented art school, Tenkai Gakusha, which produced such prominent artists as Harada Naojiro, Takahashi Genkichi, and Andō Chutarō. In 1880 he also started the publication of the first art journal in Japan. Among his representative works are Salmon (c. 1878) and Beauty (Courtesan) (1872).

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