Impressions of Ukiyo-E. Dora Amsden

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      This digression in favour of the masters of the Popular School has carried us over a hundred years, and we must return to the close of the seventeenth century. Moronobu illustrated the carnival of Genroku, but toward the end of the century, under the domination of a Shogun who combined the qualities of extravagance and profligacy with the delirious superstition of Louis XI, a period of unbridled license set in. The military men, who were the nation’s models, forgot their fine traditions and fell from their estate, so that the latter manners and customs of Genroku became a by-word. Then followed a puritanical reaction. Under the eighth Shogun, the knights were restricted from attending the theatre, just coming into favour, and the looser haunts of pleasure were strictly under ban. The Ukiyo-e print, being the medium for illustrating these joys and pleasures, forbidden to the great, but still indulged in by the people, was strictly condemned, and to this day the aristocracy of Japan accord but grudging and unwilling recognition to the merits of the masters of Ukiyo-e, the old caste prejudice still blinding their artistic sense.

      At this stage Ukiyo-e broke into rival schools, the founders of both belonging to the academy of Hishikawa Moronobu. The leader of the first, the school of painting, was Miyagawa Chōshun, who in order to preserve aristocratic patronage and praise, eschewed the use of the printing-block, still taking his subjects from the “floating world,” and so being in one sense at unity with the other branch, that of printing founded by Torii Kiyonobu, the first master of the great Torii School. As the print artists are our subject matter we cannot follow the other branch of Ukiyo-e, founded by Miyagawa Chōshun, but leaving the atelier of the painters, we must devote ourselves to the fortunes of the Torii School, the laboratory of the Ukiyo-e print, working parallel with the pictorial school for the first half of the eighteenth century.

      The first sheets of Torii Kiyonobu (about 1710) were printed in ink from a single block. Part of the edition would be issued in this uncoloured form, the rest being coloured by hand. The colours most used were olive and orange, these prints being called Tan-e, whilst those in ink were named Sumi-e. Urushi-e (lacquer pictures), was the generic term for hand-painted prints. Beni-e (literally red pictures) followed the Urushi-e. They were printed in two tones, rose and pale green, enforced by black, 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.

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