Impressions of Ukiyo-E. Dora Amsden

a harmony exquisite in delicacy. The use of the multiple colour blocks gave rise to the title Nishiki-e, or brocade paintings. The national mania for the stage induced Kiyonobu and his followers to take for their subjects popular actors, and the theatrical poster may be said to date from the decade following Genroku.

      Later in the century the process of colour-printing by the substitution of blocks for flat colours was gradually evolved, and to no special artist or engraver can the credit be given, for all contributed to its development, though the genius of Suzuki Harunobu drew to a focus in 1765 the achievements of his brother artists, and it was he who solved the problem of uniting the skill of the engraver with the full palette of Miyagawa Chōshun and his follower Miyagawa Shunsui, thus uniting the two branches of Ukiyo-e art.

      The Popular School, however, is bound up with print development. Japanese book illustration and single-sheet printing revolutionised the world’s art. The great connoisseurs of colour tell us that nowhere else is anything like it, so rich and so full, that a print comes to have every quality of a complete painting.

      The other leaders of the Torii School were Torii Kiyomasu and Okumura Masanobu, namesake of the great founder of Kanō, who must not be confused with the later artist of the same name, belonging to the school of Kitao. Masanobu deserves special mention, for his style being chiefly pictorial, and his subjects not confined to the stage, he formed a link between the painters’ atelier and his own. He realised that book prints rather than actor prints ought to be the most potent force of Ukiyo-e.

      Nishimura Shigenaga followed in the footsteps of Masanobu, but his fame is eclipsed by that of his great pupil Suzuki Harunobu, whose genius was displayed not only by the introduction of new colours upon the printing-block, but by his schemes of arrangement, juxtaposition of shades, and marvellous handling of the areas between the printed outlines. This restriction of measured spaces does not cramp the painter’s individuality and sweep of brush; rather, they set him free to concentrate his genius upon blended harmonies, and interwoven schemes of colour, and to surrender himself to the intoxication of the palette.

      Katsushika Hokusai, Seven Gods of Good Fortune, 1810.

      Ink, colours and gold on silk, 67.5 × 82.5 cm.

      Museo d’Arte Orientale Edoardo Chiossone, Genoa.

      Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Zhong Gui, 1847–1852.

      Colour woodblock print, 35.4 × 23.5 cm.

      Musée Guimet, Paris.

      Harunobu revolutionised the status of the Popular School, pronouncing this dictum, “Though I am a worker in prints I shall hereafter style myself ‘Yamato Yeishi’”, the title assumed by the ancient court painters. A national painter he declared himself, let him deny who dare, working through the new medium of the despised and ostracised Ukiyo-e print from which he determined to remove the stigma of vulgarity.

      Now we see a strange transposition in the aims of the popular artists. Harunobu, though a pupil of Shigenaga, the printer, took for his models the subjects of the painter Shunsui, successor to Miyagawa Chōshun, and by rejecting stage motives discarded the Torii tradition. From Shunsui, Harunobu borrowed the ineffable grace and refinement which breathe from the forms of his women, from the painter he stole colour harmonies and designs with landscape backgrounds, which the Torii School had hitherto ignored.

      The introduction of genre painting, though attributed by Walter Pater to Giorgione, applies equally to the work of Harunobu and his follower Isoda Koryūsai. “He is the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion nor of allegorical or historical teaching: little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape, morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon and idealised till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. People may move those spaces of cunningly blended colour readily and take them with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be used at will as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence into one’s cabinet, and like persons live with us for a day or a lifetime.” Must not such an influence have descended upon Whistler when, saturated with the atmosphere of Hiroshige, he imagined that most beautiful of his “Nocturnes” described by Theodore Child as “a vision in form and colour, in luminous air, a Japanese fancy realised on the banks of the grey Thames”?

      Utagawa Hiroshige, The Koume Embankment, February 1857.

      Colour woodblock print, 36 × 24 cm.

      Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York.

      The School of Torii. The Printers’ Branch of Ukiyo-e

      The Torii School was pre-eminently the exponent of drama. It was bound up with stage development and ministered to the emotional temperament of the nation; leading in what may be considered a national obsession, a mania for actors and actor-prints.

      A fascinating subject is this century of dramatic evolution fostered by the printers’ branch of the Popular School. Actors had been consigned, in dark feudal days, to the lowest rung in the ladder of caste, ranking next to the outcast (Eta), as in early English days the strolling player was associated with tinkers and other vagrant populations.

      The No Kagura and lyric drama – suggesting the mediaeval- and passion-plays of Europe – prefigured modern drama in Japan, but the immediate precursor of the present theatre was the Puppet Show, a Japanese apotheosis of European marionette performances. It is interesting to note that Toyokuni carried further than any one the power of mimetic art, and with whose theatrical scenes we are most familiar. He began his career as a maker of dolls, and these puppets were eagerly sought after as works of art.

      If the aphorism “not to go to the theatre is like making one’s toilet without a mirror,” be true, then the Japanese are justified in their national passion for the stage, which overshadows the love of any other amusement. Taking the phrase literally, it was to the actors, and the printers who broadcast their pictures, that the people owed the aesthetic wonders of their costume. The designers were also artists, as instanced by Hishikawa Moronobu, the Kyoto designer and Edo embroiderer, the printer and painter, illustrator of books and originator of Ukiyo-e.

      Enthusiasm for the portraits of actors, fostered by the Torii printers from the foundation of the school by Kiyonobu, in about 1710, hastened no doubt the development of colour-printing. As early as Genroku, the portrait of Danjūrō the second of the great dynasty of actors, who by their genius helped to brighten the fortunes of the playhouse, was sold for five Yen cash, in the streets of the capital.

      The combined genius of the artists, engravers and printers of Ukiyo-e evolved and perfected the use of the multiple colour-blocks. Toward the middle of the century, under the waning powers of Torii Kiyomitsu, successor to Kiyonobu, the school seemed to be sinking into oblivion, for Harunobu, its rightful exponent, filled with visions of ethereal refinement, scorned the theatrical arena. When most needed, however, a prophet arose in the person of Shunshō, the painter, the pupil of Shunsui and master of Hokusai, thus completing the transformation begun by Harunobu. The great scions of the rival branches of Ukiyo-e, printing and painting, stepped into each other’s places and bridged the chasm, which threatened the unity of the Popular School.

      Katsushika Hokusai, Farmers Crossing a Suspension Bridge, on the Border of Hida and Etchu Provinces, from the series Famous Bridges of Various Provinces, 1834.

      Colour woodblock print, 26 × 38.3 cm.

      Pulverer Collection, Cologne.

      Katsushika Hokusai, Suspension Bridge on the Mount Gyōtō, next to Ashikaga, from the series Famous Bridges of Various Provinces, c. 1834.

      Colour woodblock print, 25.7 × 38.4 cm.

      Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo.

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