Takahashi Yuichi

Takahashi Yuichi
Takahashi Yuichi
Born	(1826-03-20)March 20, 1826 Edo Japan
Died	July 6, 1894(1894-07-06) (aged 68) Tokyo, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Known for	Painter,
Movement	Yōga

Takahashi Yuichi (高橋 由一^?, March 20, 1828 – July 6, 1894) was a Japanese painter, noted for his pioneering work in developing the yōga (Western-style) art movement in late 19th-century Japanese painting.

Takahashi was born to an samurai class household at the Edo residence of Sano Domain, a subsidiary han of Sakura Domain, where his father was a retainer of the Hotta clan. Interested in art from childhood, he apprenticed to the Kanō school, but later became fascinated with western-style art through lithographs which were being available in Japan during the Bakumatsu period. In 1862, he obtained a position at arts department the Bansho Shirabesho, the Tokugawa shogunate’s research institute in western learning, where he studied under Kawakami Togai, and where he began experimentation with oil painting. In 1866, he went to Yokohama to study under the English artist and cartoonist Charles Wirgman, who was so impressed with his talent that he sponsored his participation in the Paris World Exhibition of 1867.

After the Meiji Restoration, despite his largely self-taught credentials, he was appointed a professor of art at the Kobubijutsu Gakkō (the Technical Fine Arts School) by the new Meiji government, and was a student and an assistant for the Italian foreign advisor Antonio Fontanesi, who had been hired by the Meiji government in the late 1870s to introduce western oil painting to Japan.