KIYONAGA: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI WITH ATTENDANTS.KIYONAGA: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI WITH ATTENDANTS.One of a Series "Designs of Spring Greenery." Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga.Plate 25.
KIYONAGA: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI WITH ATTENDANTS.One of a Series "Designs of Spring Greenery." Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga.
Plate 25.
The Yoshiwara or licensed quarter of Yedo was established in 1614 as part of the general Tokugawa regime of orderliness and control: even by that datethe authorities had tired of the cruel and ugly chaos that prevails in these matters to-day in our cities. The name of the quarter was derived from the fact that it was located in the midst of an ancient "yoshiwara" or rush-moor. In 1657, after a fire that demolished all the buildings, the quarter was moved to a site half a mile north of the great Asakusa temple in the north-east outskirts of the city, where it remains to this day. Within this moated and walled enclosure about a quarter of a mile square, to which access was obtained through one great gate, stood orderly rows of large houses crowded close together. The front of each house was latticed; behind the bars appeared the splendidly clad inmates. These were of many grades and ranks; it is, as a rule, the highest class only that are represented in the prints.
The high-class Oiran was a notable personage. Her state was like that of a princess. Attendant upon her were customarily two small girls, called Kamuro, who acted as lady's-maids; and one or two older girls, called Shinzo, whose duties were those of a kind of maid-of-honour. Her attire, of a gorgeousness wholly different from the costume of the ordinary woman, bedecks her in many of the prints with truly royal splendour. Poets sang of her; artists painted her; the common people talked of her with the same frank and admiring interest that our populace bestows upon theatrical favourites. Moralless though her life was, it was not in any external sense degraded; she stood in the position in which have stood all the great courtesans of history.
The names of the more famous among the Oiran have come down to us wrapped in glowing tradition. Hana-ōgi of the House of Ōgi-ya, the most beautiful and deeply loved courtesan of her time, moves immortal through the designs of Kiyonaga, Shuncho, Yeishi, Utamaro, and their contemporaries. She was a pupil of the poet Tōkō Genrin, and ranked as a distinguished artist in both Chinese and Japanese verse. At one time, obeying the dictates of a profound attachment, she dared all perils and fled from the Yoshiwara with her lover. These facts, together with the filial piety for which she was renowned, doubtless augmented her romantic fame. Of her beauty and lordly carriage the prints leave us no doubt. Again and again we find lavished upon her well-beloved figure all the resources of the greatest artists. InPlate 25she is the leading figure, with her attendants grouped around her; inPlate 32she stands beside a latticed window opening on to the Sumida River, alone and meditative.
It is necessary for any one who would understand the art of the period to put aside preconceived notions and realize that these courtesan-portraits are not representations of low gutter creatures, but that they portray women of the highest degree of intellectual refinement who were in real life much like the cultivatedhetairæof ancient Athens, the companions, friends, and beloveds of Pericles and Plato.
KIYONAGA: LADY WITH TWO ATTENDANTS.KIYONAGA: LADY WITH TWO ATTENDANTS.One of a Series "Brocades of the East." Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga. Gookin Collection.Plate 26.
KIYONAGA: LADY WITH TWO ATTENDANTS.One of a Series "Brocades of the East." Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga. Gookin Collection.
Plate 26.
And as one examines the few records which Japanese writers have given to the Western world, the conviction grows ever stronger that at this time, when the free and romantic love of men and womenwas a thing alien to the businesslike Japanese marriage system, the one region where love as we understand it might flourish—the one region where might arise those desperate attachments of heart for heart which we regard as heroic—was the isolated enclosure of the Yoshiwara. There no shrewd parents arranged the unwilling, blind match; there the hampered spirits of that day found freedom, however perilous; and there alone men and women, though surrounded by an atmosphere of sordid corruption, faced death as did the Tristram and Iseult of our legends, in the service of a passion more precious than life itself.... For the Oiran could turn lover.
Festival Scene.
What gods are these, reborn from gracious daysTo fill our gardens with diviner mouldThan therein dwelling? What bright race of oldRevisits here one hour our mortal ways?Serene, dispassionate, with lordly gazeThey move through this clear afternoon of gold,Equal to life and all its deeps may hold,Calm, spacious masters of the glimmering maze.What gods are these? or godlike men? whom earthSuffices, in a wisdom just and highThat not repines the boundaries of its birthBut fills its destined measure utterly—Finding in mortal sweetness perfect worth,Not yet grown homesick for the wastes of sky.
What gods are these, reborn from gracious daysTo fill our gardens with diviner mouldThan therein dwelling? What bright race of oldRevisits here one hour our mortal ways?Serene, dispassionate, with lordly gazeThey move through this clear afternoon of gold,Equal to life and all its deeps may hold,Calm, spacious masters of the glimmering maze.
What gods are these? or godlike men? whom earthSuffices, in a wisdom just and highThat not repines the boundaries of its birthBut fills its destined measure utterly—Finding in mortal sweetness perfect worth,Not yet grown homesick for the wastes of sky.
The reader will perhaps have noted how many artists of the preceding period withdrew toward the close of their careers from the field to which a new conqueror had come. This universal victor wasKiyonaga. No other Ukioye artist ever so dominated his period. All earlier print-designers were gradually driven into retirement by his colossal success, and the majority of his contemporaries adopted his style. In him all previously developed resources met; after him began that long decline which led through intermediate stages of such hauntingly lovely decadence to the final death of the art. The Torii School now awoke from its quiescence, and for the second and final time assumed the dominance it had in the days of Kiyonobu.
KIYONAGA.KIYONAGA.
KIYONAGA.
Little is known of Kiyonaga's life. Born in 1742, he worked as a young man for a bookseller in Yedo. He studied painting under Kiyomitsu, became the fourth head of the Torii School, produced the most important portion of his work between 1777 and 1790, and not long after 1790 retired from any large amount of further print-designing. His death occurred in 1815.
Though Kiyonaga was a pupil of Kiyomitsu, little of that artist's influence is visible in his work. It is true that his earliest sheets, actors inhoso-yeform, are precisely like Kiyomitsu's; but he appears to have abandoned this style very quickly, and most of his early actor-prints resemble Shunsho's more than his master's. In certain of his early works Harunobu's influence is evident; and the long-dead Moronobu's manner of line-work sometimes appears.From Masanobu he perhaps inherited the grand carriage of his women. Later, Shigemasa's style influenced him, and Koriusai had a marked effect upon his development. He absorbed inspiration from all these artists, gathering to himself the best in the heritage of the past, and then struck out with a boldness that is never bizarre, an originality that is never affected, into his own natural and masterful manner.
KIYONAGA: THE COURTESAN SHIZUKA WITH ATTENDANTS IN THE PEONY GARDEN AT ASAKUSA.KIYONAGA: THE COURTESAN SHIZUKA WITH ATTENDANTS IN THE PEONY GARDEN AT ASAKUSA.Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga.Plate 27.
KIYONAGA: THE COURTESAN SHIZUKA WITH ATTENDANTS IN THE PEONY GARDEN AT ASAKUSA.Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga.
Plate 27.
By about 1777 he had developed his distinctive style. Its most obvious characteristic lies in the new quality of the figures he depicts. His types perhaps grew out of those of Koriusai; but he combined with Koriusai's richness a monumental quality to find the equal of which we must go back to the Primitives. It is his union of the pre-Harunobu dignity with the Harunobu grace and colour, in a superb and easy synthesis of his own—a truly grand style—that has made him by common consent the foremost Ukioye artist.
The type of figure which Kiyonaga created is expressive of a more stable equilibrium of spiritual forces than any seen before. It embodies a normality of attitude characteristic of the great culminating periods of art. The primitive artist expresses himself in figures whose mannerisms and constraint suggest the limitations of his technique; the decadent artist, as we shall see later, pours his visions into figures of a slender langour and relaxation that parallel his own weariness and satiety; but the artist of the prime draws large-limbed, wholesome, magnificently normal figures as the symbols of his magnificently normal mind.
These figures of Kiyonaga's mature period are unforgettable creations. Tall and strong, moving with the unconscious and stately grace of superb animals, they carry the suggestion of a spiritual structure even more glorious than the structure of their bodies; and one looks upon them with a sentiment not unlike awe, as upon princesses of some land of the gods. Kiyonaga's perfect drawing, operating through a naturalistic yet highly imaginative convention, ennobles the forms he portrays as did the convention of the Greek sculptors; and he comes nearer to the Greek sentiment toward the nude than does any other Japanese artist except Toyonobu. His nudes themselves are not what I now refer to, but rather to that sense of bodily presence, that consciousness of the limbs beneath the draperies, which, as inPlate 28, one finds recurrently in his pictures. He keeps his draperies simple, denying himself the gorgeous brocades of birds and flowers which Koriusai used so richly. The garments he draws are beautiful; but he does not lose in their ornamentation the lines of the splendidly proportioned body beneath; muscles contract and limbs move under the fine folds; and our sense of the textiles is dominated by our sense of the organism within.
The movements, gestures, and attitudes of these figures are tranquil and strong; their forms are never melting or seductive, but always touched with a fine rigour. In one notable diptych, where a group of women and a seated man are gathered on the terrace of a tea-house overlooking the seashore,vigour of spiritual sanity and refinement of pictorial composition touch the highest point reached in the whole course of the art. The harmonies of this particular design, "The Terrace by the Sea," embody the best and most characteristic powers of Kiyonaga.
KIYONAGA: TWO WOMEN AND A TEA-HOUSE WAITRESS BESIDE THE SUMIDA RIVER.KIYONAGA: TWO WOMEN AND A TEA-HOUSE WAITRESS BESIDE THE SUMIDA RIVER.One sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga. Gookin Collection.Plate 28.
KIYONAGA: TWO WOMEN AND A TEA-HOUSE WAITRESS BESIDE THE SUMIDA RIVER.One sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga. Gookin Collection.
Plate 28.
We have never seen in bodily presence such people as Kiyonaga's. Yet, as Turner is reported to have said of his sunset, "don't you wish you had?" These figures are serene, supernatural, Olympian; fictional, just as Harunobu's are but differing from his in that they interpret possible development and portray the human ideal, and do not lie apart from reality in a region of private vision.
Kiyonaga saw, as the greatest artists of mature epochs have always seen, that the fictions of personal fancy are not so interesting or so beautiful as imaginative renderings of reality. In so far as he respected reality he was a realist. Yet he was never the dupe of that realism which attempts to report photographically. In his renderings fact took a harmonious place alongside of those idealizations which were personal to him. Kiyonaga saw Nature with clear eyes, and on the solid foundation of observed fact he reared the noble structure of his vision of life—a vision in which the world is peopled by a race such as the human race ought to be.
This was Kiyonaga's primary contribution to Ukioye art. Consequent upon it he introduced certain important innovations.
We have seen how Harunobu, dreaming in colour and pushing to the farthest limits the refinements oftechnique in colour-printing, produced miniature jewelled improvisations that have never been equalled. Harunobu customarily elaborated every portion of his sheet with these inlayings of beautiful tones, enriching his figures with gauffrage and tinting his backgrounds of sky and water. He resembled a worker in enamels who must cover every inch of his surface with luminous hues.
But just as Harunobu toward the end of his life felt these effects to be only partially adequate, and turned to the larger world of pillar-prints—so from the beginning Kiyonaga found this jewelled delicacy to be incompatible with the scope that was the need of his specific genius. He discarded all those lovely tricks of the engraver and the printer which had been almost an end in themselves to Harunobu. He abstained from giving to his backgrounds Harunobu's exquisite neutral tones, feeling that they could only suffer by the addition of tint. He was no colour-dreamer, but a great harmonist of lines and spaces; and the lofty skies and wide horizons that create distance behind his figures attest his wisdom.
Similarly he was unable to content himself with the flawless grace of line that Harunobu and Buncho had mastered. Either from the powerful and massive brush-strokes of Moronobu or from the even more expressive brushwork of Shigemasa, he derived a style that is one of his chief glories. No use of line was ever more virile than his. The brush seems to vibrate in his hand; the strokes are instinct with life along every fraction of their length; the line narrows, widens, swirls, breaks, and flows in perfect responseto the will of the mind behind it. So individual is Kiyonaga's touch that it would be possible for an expert to attribute to him a print of which only one square inch survived.
KIYONAGA: YOSHITSUNE SERENADING THE LADY JORURIHIME.KIYONAGA: YOSHITSUNE SERENADING THE LADY JORURIHIME.A triptych. Each sheet size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga. Spaulding Collection.Plate 29.
KIYONAGA: YOSHITSUNE SERENADING THE LADY JORURIHIME.A triptych. Each sheet size 15 × 10. SignedKiyonaga ga. Spaulding Collection.
Plate 29.
It is characteristic of Kiyonaga's style that he did not confine himself to the small square sheets used by Harunobu and the small oblonghoso-yeused by Shunsho. His most important work is in the form of the large full-size sheets which he adopted from Koriusai. In these he rose to a height unparalleled in Ukioye; and M. Koechlin is quite right in esteeming Kiyonaga's sense of elaborate composition, here so impressively displayed, as his chief grandeur.
In the series of large sheets without backgrounds, "Designs of Spring Greenery," one of which is reproduced inPlate 25—Kiyonaga produced work not very different from that of his collaborator Koriusai. Only in certain sheets is there a harmonious grasp of the full possibilities of pictorial composition. But proceeding to other series, the gap widens. In the series "Present Day Beauties of the Yoshiwara," he advanced to his own unique field. Possibly he touched the supreme height in the great group "Brocades of the Customs of the East," which includes such well-known prints as the two saltwater carriers on the seashore, the three singers at the bath, the two ladies conversing with a flower-vendor, and the print reproduced inPlate 26.
From these prints Kiyonaga proceeded to still further combinations, devising compositions in which two, three, or even five sheets unite into one wide design. For the triptych we have Kiyonaga to thank.The triptych was not, it is true, literally Kiyonaga's invention; many artists in the First and Second Periods had producedhoso-yesheets in sets of three that could be joined together to form one picture. In fact, each set of three was originally one sheet printed from one set of blocks; and it was convenience and economy rather than the idea of producing any real three-piece composition that led to the production of these sets. The prints were almost always conceived as separate pictures; they seldom gain by juxtaposition, and frequently suffer by it.
Far other was the impulse that led Kiyonaga to his diptych and triptych compositions. The great triptych of the "Disembarkment," the diptych of the "Night Expedition," the "Serenade" triptych reproduced inPlate 29, and the whole series of diptychs called "Twelve Months of the South," to which belongs the marvellous "Terrace by the Sea," are all dominated by an indigenous rhythm of line and colour. These designs have not Shunsho's startling force, nor Harunobu's minutely detailed grace, nor Koriusai's richness; all these elements Kiyonaga sacrifices for a broader sweep and a more unified pictorial quality. His designs co-ordinate the elements of line, colour, figures, and landscape into total impressions of such large harmony as we have not seen before and shall hardly see again. To over-estimate the genius that produced the grouping of his best work is impossible; to realize it fully requires careful analysis, so unobtrusive and inevitable are its effects.
KIYONAGA: GEISHA WITH SERVANT CARRYING LUTE-BOX. KIYONAGA: WOMAN PAINTING HER EYEBROWS.KIYONAGA: GEISHA WITH SERVANT CARRYING LUTE-BOX.Size 27 × 4½.SignedKiyonaga ga.KIYONAGA: WOMAN PAINTING HER EYEBROWS.Size 27 × 6.SignedKiyonaga ga.Plate 30.
KIYONAGA: GEISHA WITH SERVANT CARRYING LUTE-BOX. KIYONAGA: WOMAN PAINTING HER EYEBROWS.
KIYONAGA: GEISHA WITH SERVANT CARRYING LUTE-BOX.Size 27 × 4½.SignedKiyonaga ga.
KIYONAGA: WOMAN PAINTING HER EYEBROWS.Size 27 × 6.SignedKiyonaga ga.
Plate 30.
Kiyonaga's greatest works are these triptychs anddiptychs in which he depicts the holiday life of his Olympian figures. Even single sheets from them are treasures; for though they combine into still greater compositions, each one, as we may see inPlate 27, or in any one of the sheets ofPlate 29, is a perfect unit that can stand alone. His pillar-prints, of which two appear inPlate 30, are ranked among the foremost works in this form.
Eventually Kiyonaga's finest manner passed. Though the vigour of his brush-strokes remained, his figures began to take on an exaggerated length and slimness characteristic of the coming decadence. Therefore his retirement from print-designing, a little after 1790, was not, as in the case of Harunobu's untimely death, an irreparable loss. His greatest work was finished. Why he retired is not known; the various speculations on the subject are not very enlightening.
Though the finest Kiyonaga prints rarely come into the market nowadays, the less important examples of his work are by no means impossible to obtain. His smaller prints, and his pillar-prints in particular, are among the most attractive acquisitions remaining for the collector. The large single sheets, if fine impressions and in fine condition, are among the foremost of the collector's treasures. The great triptychs are almost unprocurable, except in poor condition.
The collector must patiently await his opportunity. There is probably not a single Kiyonaga obtainable anywhere to-day that is of the quality of that unique group of marvellously printed masterpieces whichonce belonged to Fenollosa, and which is now one of the glories of the Spaulding Collection in Boston. Similarly, the Mansfield Collection in New York and the Buckingham Collection in Chicago contain Kiyonagas which are the result of long years of search and which could not be duplicated in all the markets of the world combined.
Torii Kiyomasawas the son of Kiyonaga. His work, produced between 1810 and 1825, is without special distinction.
Among the minor pupils may be named Kiyotsugi, Kiyohisa, Kiyokatsu, Kiyotei, Kiyotoki, Kiyoyuki, Kiyohide II, Kiyotsune II.
Every artist of the day was influenced by Kiyonaga; among those difficult to classify otherwise may be named the following men:—
Sanchō, who worked in the neighbourhood of 1780, produced prints somewhat in the manner of Shuncho. Delicacy rather than strength distinguished him in the few examples of his work I have seen.
Harumitsuis an artist whose work is known to me only by one pillar-print in my collection. Fenollosa, who once owned the print, noted on the margin of it: "A rare man. Name may be also read Shunkō, but not the same as the pupil of Shunsho. A follower of Kiyonaga." And this is all the information I have been able to obtain about him. It is possible that he is the same as Shunko II.
SHUNCHO: GROUP AT A TEMPLE GATE.SHUNCHO: GROUP AT A TEMPLE GATE.A diptych. Each sheet size 15 × 10. SignedShuncho ga. Mansfield Collection.Plate 31.
SHUNCHO: GROUP AT A TEMPLE GATE.A diptych. Each sheet size 15 × 10. SignedShuncho ga. Mansfield Collection.
Plate 31.
Your lovely ladies shall not fadeThough Yedo's moated walls be laidLevel with dust, and night-owls broodOver the city's solitude.Far be the coming of that day!Yet that it comes not, who shall say?Who knows how long the halls shall standOf your once-golden wonderland?Perhaps shall Nikko crumble down,Its carvings worn, its glow turned brownThrough many winters. On that hillWhere great Ieyasu's brazen willIn brazen tomb now takes its rest,Perhaps the eagle's young shall nest.Kyoto's gardens cannot last.At Kamakura, where the vastForm of the Buddha fronts the sea,A waste of waves may someday be....Ah, stale and flat the warning bellWhose melancholy accents tellImpermanence to hearts that guessTime's undiscovered loveliness.A fairer Yedo shall arise;A richer Nikko praise the skies;Ieyasus mightier than of oldShall cast the world in wiser mould;Fresh gardens shall be spread; new faithShall spring when Buddha is a wraith—And more puissant hands than yoursShall paint anew life's ancient lures.Yet when he comes who shall surpassYour beauty that so matchless was,A joy shall light him through your eyes,A flame shall from your embers rise,Your gentle art shall make him wiseIn mastery of melodies.And though your wreath in dust be laid,Your lovely ladies shall not fade!
Your lovely ladies shall not fadeThough Yedo's moated walls be laidLevel with dust, and night-owls broodOver the city's solitude.Far be the coming of that day!Yet that it comes not, who shall say?Who knows how long the halls shall standOf your once-golden wonderland?Perhaps shall Nikko crumble down,Its carvings worn, its glow turned brownThrough many winters. On that hillWhere great Ieyasu's brazen willIn brazen tomb now takes its rest,Perhaps the eagle's young shall nest.Kyoto's gardens cannot last.At Kamakura, where the vastForm of the Buddha fronts the sea,A waste of waves may someday be....Ah, stale and flat the warning bellWhose melancholy accents tellImpermanence to hearts that guessTime's undiscovered loveliness.A fairer Yedo shall arise;A richer Nikko praise the skies;Ieyasus mightier than of oldShall cast the world in wiser mould;Fresh gardens shall be spread; new faithShall spring when Buddha is a wraith—And more puissant hands than yoursShall paint anew life's ancient lures.Yet when he comes who shall surpassYour beauty that so matchless was,A joy shall light him through your eyes,A flame shall from your embers rise,Your gentle art shall make him wiseIn mastery of melodies.And though your wreath in dust be laid,Your lovely ladies shall not fade!
Nothing is known of the life or personality of Katsukawa Shuncho. His name and certainpeculiarities of his drawing indicate unmistakably that he began his career as a pupil of Shunsho; but he soon fell under the influence of Kiyonaga and became that artist's most notable follower. His main work lies between the years 1775 and 1800; it is thought that he stopped designing prints before the latter year, though he is said to have lived until after 1821. His designs, one of which appears inPlate 31, comprise chiefly figures of women, drawn with extraordinary grace of line and softness of colouring.
SHUNCHO.SHUNCHO.
SHUNCHO.
Except in a few early actor-prints, Shuncho had only one manner—that which we have come to call the middle Kiyonaga style. It was early in his career that he threw off the harsh dominance of Shunsho. M. Raymond Koechlin points out that had he remained under that influence he would without doubt have been lost in the banal horde of designers of actor-prints who spiritlessly followed that great artist. For there was nothing in common between the rugged masterful genius of Shunsho and the luminous grace of his pupil. Kiyonaga's style, however, Shuncho could adopt and utilize to express his own peculiar and mild sense of beauty, with a perfection that makes him stand out unique among Kiyonaga's disciples. Other pupils of Kiyonaga followed the master for a longer or shorter while; but all the others sooner or later developed stylesof their own or copied the styles of other leaders—often eccentric and decadent leaders, far inferior to him whom they had abandoned. But Shuncho, having adopted the Kiyonaga manner at its noblest, when the proportions in the drawing of the figure were most natural and dignified, never departed from it except to make it slightly less naturalistic, in accordance with what he had learned from his first master Shunsho. That this was so manifests Shuncho's purity of feeling, and also reveals his strange lack of desire to experiment in new manners. No artist so great as Shuncho has ever been so little endowed with initiative and invention. I fancy that he marks the point in the development of the Ukioye School where, after the progressive force of Kiyonaga had spent itself, the art stands still for a brief moment of perfect balance before it begins to take its course down the long slope of the decline.
SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES UNDER UMBRELLA. SHUNCHO: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI—THE SUMIDA RIVER SEEN THROUGH THE WINDOW.SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES UNDER UMBRELLA.Size 17 × 4½.SignedShuncho ga.SHUNCHO: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI—THE SUMIDA RIVER SEEN THROUGH THE WINDOW.Size 27 × 5.SignedShuncho ga.Plate 32.
SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES UNDER UMBRELLA. SHUNCHO: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI—THE SUMIDA RIVER SEEN THROUGH THE WINDOW.
SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES UNDER UMBRELLA.Size 17 × 4½.SignedShuncho ga.
SHUNCHO: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI—THE SUMIDA RIVER SEEN THROUGH THE WINDOW.Size 27 × 5.SignedShuncho ga.
Plate 32.
In many respects like Kiyonaga, Shuncho can hardly be regarded as second even to his master, except in originality. He lacked Kiyonaga's great creative imagination—an imagination which brought into being the Olympian style. But his gifts enabled him to assimilate this style perfectly and turn it to his own slightly different uses. His sense of composition is rather undistinguished when compared with Kiyonaga's; but the delicacy of his drawing, the restrained harmonies of his colour, and the clean vitality of his line have a beauty that we could ill afford to sacrifice even for Kiyonaga's strength. Kiyonaga brings down the gods in all their noble dignity to walk the earth in calm magnificence; butShuncho leads us into a secret heaven where the loveliest and most flower-like of the gods have remained behind. His is a softer beauty, touched with remote half-lights, vibrant with faint wistfulness; his superb women turn in mid-joy as though far and grave music had suddenly drifted to their hearing; their perfection passes over into the region where beauty becomes sadness. No women in the whole range of Japanese art so haunt one's memory as do his; no beauty seems at the same time so flawless and so charged with the burden of transitoriness. One cannot but feel that where Kiyonaga's healthy vision saw only the happiness and brilliance and splendour of the forms that swept by him in the mortal procession, Shuncho saw also the ghostly fleetness of their passing and the melancholy of their radiance sunset-bound; and around his figures this sense throws a quiet tender light, a suggestion of brooding and caressing sweetness.
SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES IN A BOAT ON THE SUMIDA RIVER. YEISHO: TWO COURTESANS AFTER THE BATH.SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES IN A BOAT ON THE SUMIDA RIVER.Size 26 × 4½.Unsigned.YEISHO: TWO COURTESANS AFTER THE BATH.Size 25 × 5.SignedYeisho ga.Plate 33.
SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES IN A BOAT ON THE SUMIDA RIVER. YEISHO: TWO COURTESANS AFTER THE BATH.
SHUNCHO: TWO LADIES IN A BOAT ON THE SUMIDA RIVER.Size 26 × 4½.Unsigned.
YEISHO: TWO COURTESANS AFTER THE BATH.Size 25 × 5.SignedYeisho ga.
Plate 33.
In his finest prints the softly luminous colour and the gently sweeping lines of his ladies move sometimes through the palely glowing rooms of palaces, but more often through sunlit fields and gardens and blossoming groves—regions of delight and cloudless skies, scenes of eternal happiness. His colour-schemes in these natural settings are artfully contrived to produce, through the limited agency of flat tints, an impression of crystal-clear atmosphere around and behind the figures. In both his triptychs and his pillar-prints there often stretches away this delicate world of hills or seashore or river-bank that plays no small part in the incantation of beauty.His pillar-prints, of which three are reproduced in Plates32and33, are especially fine; I sometimes think that here he surpasses Kiyonaga.
And yet there is about all his work a strange impersonality, an absence of any note that brings to our notice Shuncho himself, the observer and recorder. He is detached even from his own most perfect work. Compare him with Harunobu or Sharaku or Utamaro, and observe how invisible he is—how his designs have a transparency that absolutely conceals him.
In historical importance and in originality Shuncho is secondary to Kiyonaga; in absolute beauty his work deserves a place beside that of the master. As a colourist—his most distinguished rôle—he was perhaps the greater of the two.
The collector may be interested to note that practically all Shuncho's work is printed with the utmost sharpness and refinement; poor impressions of his prints are almost unknown. In this particular he is in striking contrast to many of his contemporaries; and one may perhaps trace his care to the training of Shunsho, of whose work also I have seldom seen a really poor impression. Shuncho's work is unfortunately not common; finely preserved copies are scarcer than Kiyonaga's.
Katsukawa Shunzan was a little-known artist who worked from about 1775 to about 1810. He was first, as his name would suggest, a pupil of Shunsho; in his rare early prints inhoso-yeform he producedactors in the manner of that school with considerable charm of line, but without great vigour. Even in these early pieces Shunzan's leaning towards sweetness and suavity suggests that he was not at home in the Shunsho manner; and it is not strange to find that he later turned to Kiyonaga, under whose powerful influence he produced his best-known work—beautiful ladies in robes of splendour. He generally copied the Kiyonaga type of figure closely, but a little stiffly; and he was not often master of those harmonies of arrangement and grouping which distinguished his teacher. But occasionally his colour is very rich and glowing.
SHUNZAN.SHUNZAN.
SHUNZAN.
Either he produced little or else time has been even less than normally kind to his work, for few prints by him survive.
Kubo Shunman was one of those singular artists who fascinate us almost as much by mystery as by beauty. Living from 1757 to 1820, or, as some authorities say, to 1829, he was at one time a pupil of Shigemasa; but he later turned to Kiyonaga as his final and most important teacher. From Kiyonaga he learned the rudiments of his style; yet on the whole his work resembles Kiyonaga very little. An individual touch dominates all his compositions. He may be called the symphonistof greys; for a large part of his most notable production is done in modulated shades of this colour, heightened and made luminous here and there by carefully calculated touches of green, yellow, red, or violet. His figures are drawn in a manner less solid than Kiyonaga's; as inPlate 45, the lines seem tormented and strained into arabesques of peculiar and restless beauty. The harmony of his colour is kept by this sharp intensity of line-work from sinking into mere sweetness and flatness.
KUBO SHUNMAN.KUBO SHUNMAN.
KUBO SHUNMAN.
These figures of Shunman, sketched with the curious uneasiness of line of which I speak, stand before backgrounds of equal strangeness. The landscapes seem instinct with an obscure life; the Talking Oak of Dodona was never more haunted than are they. His great six-sheet composition, "The Six Tamagawa," is positively disturbing in the feeling of supernatural forces that it awakens. As Fenollosa says: "Everything he does has a strange touch. The Kiyonaga face becomes distorted with a sort of divine frenzy; trees grope about with their branch-tips like sentient beings; flowers seem to exhale unknown perfumes, and the waters of his streams writhe and glide with a sort of reptilian fascination." Or, as Mr. Arthur Morrison puts it: "There is a touch of fantasy in most of his published designs, as well as in someof his original pictures—an atmosphere as of some strange country where the trees, the rocks, the flowers, and the streams are alive with human senses and mysterious communion."
For reasons not wholly clear, the work of Shunman is received by the Japanese connoisseurs with more favour than that of most Ukioye artists. Some obscure quality of restraint and imagination relates him to the older classical schools in a way that makes him acceptable to their aristocratic exclusiveness of taste.
Shunman's best prints are so rare as to be beyond the dreams of the ordinary collector. His complete "Tamagawa" is a work for which all the great collectors in the world compete. His smaller prints and book-illustrations are, however, procurable; and his surimono are excellent and fairly numerous. His pillar-prints, of which only three or four designs are known to me, are remarkably fine.
Two Women.
What floors have ye trod? What sky-paven places have opened their halls to your eyes?What light was yours, through summerward spaces watching the swallow that flies?What holy silence has touched your faces—what hush of paradise?I think that he died of a longing unspoken who dreamed you to walk in our ways.The wheel at the cistern, the pitcher is broken: ye wot not that dust decays—Ye, torn from the heart of the dreamer as token to dreamers of other days.
What floors have ye trod? What sky-paven places have opened their halls to your eyes?What light was yours, through summerward spaces watching the swallow that flies?What holy silence has touched your faces—what hush of paradise?
I think that he died of a longing unspoken who dreamed you to walk in our ways.The wheel at the cistern, the pitcher is broken: ye wot not that dust decays—Ye, torn from the heart of the dreamer as token to dreamers of other days.
Kitao Masanobu was another of the pupils of Shigemasa who marched eventually beneath the banner of Kiyonaga, though he retained to the last much of his first master's manner. Born in 1761, he lived until 1816. His occupations besides painting were various: he kept a tobacco-shop, and was best known in his own day under the literary name of Kyōden, for his highly popular novels and comic poems. He produced very few prints, but those few are of distinguished quality, all of them probably the product of his early years, before he reached the age of thirty. At least one of these, reproduced inPlate 31, is an unsurpassable triumph. His resemblance to his first master is so marked that it is not always possible at first glance to distinguish his prints from those of Shigemasa. In fact there is a certain unsigned pillar-print, representing the two lovers Komurasaki and Gompachi, which is still of doubtful authorship, some authorities attributing it to Shigemasa, while others assign it to Masanobu.
MASANOBU (KITAO).MASANOBU (KITAO).
MASANOBU (KITAO).
Possibly Kitao Masanobu is most widely known for his elaborate illustrated book, "Celebrated Women of the Tea Houses and their Handwritings." This volume was published about 1780; I have already referred to it in dealing with the great illustrated book of Shunsho and Shigemasa. It consists of seven large double-page illustrations in many colours,and is a highly praised work, sheets of which are often mounted as separate prints. It appears to me, however, to have been overrated; and my impression is that in these designs elaborateness has smothered composition and richness has obliterated beauty.
Kitao Masanobu's single-sheet prints are lamentably few, as are also his pillar-prints; but from those that remain to us it is possible to rank Masanobu as an artist second to only the very greatest. Spirituality is a clumsy word to use in describing work so definitely embodied as this; yet none other conveys the sense of his peculiar and grave harmony. The mature beauty of his work carries us back to the perfection of Shigemasa.
The collector will search long before he finds an important print by this artist to add to his collection.
Kitao Masayoshi, who frequently signed himself Keisai or Shosin, was a curious and original designer, who lived from 1761 to 1824. Though a pupil of Shigemasa, he appears to have drawn a large part of his inspiration from a source outside the Ukioye movement—the Kano School of painting, in which the classical traditions still flourished. In his main period, contemporaneous with Kiyonaga, his work was little influenced by the great master. His designs are marked chiefly by the vividness of his observation of flowers, animals, and landscape, and by his technical skill in recording them. His books of sketches are his best-known works—drawings in a manner new to wood-engraving; he seldomemploys any key-block, but leaves the main body of his colour in broad impressionistic sweeps of the brush without definite boundary. He approached Nature somewhat as did Hokusai in later days, with a sharp perception and infinite interest. His work lies aside from the main current of Ukioye history—an interesting backwater that comes more properly within the region of classical painting than within that of prints.
KITAO MASANOBU: THE CUCKOO.KITAO MASANOBU: THE CUCKOO.Size 15½ × 22.Signed Masanobu ga. Spaulding Collection.Plate 34.
KITAO MASANOBU: THE CUCKOO.Size 15½ × 22.Signed Masanobu ga. Spaulding Collection.
Plate 34.
Single-sheet prints by Masayoshi are very rare. His book-sheets are somewhat more frequently met with.
VITHE FOURTHPERIOD:THE DECADENCEFROM THERETIREMENT OF KIYONAGATO THEDEATH OF UTAMARO(1790-1806)
From the Retirement of Kiyonaga to the Death of Utamaro (1790-1806)
The change that confronts us as we turn from the period of Kiyonaga to that of Utamaro, Yeishi, and Toyokuni is one whose significance is not at first sight wholly clear. We find the sound and classic figures of Kiyonaga gradually replaced by new and fascinating types—slender drooping bodies, wonderfully piled coiffures, elaborately brocaded robes; and the virile drawing of the earlier master gives way to the sinuous curves and arresting plasticity of the new designers. The favourite types of this time are almost as unreal as those of the Primitives, but they convey a totally different feeling; on the one hand, in their curious perverted way, they are far more realistic than the Primitives ever dreamed of being; and on the other hand, they seem the products of minds weary of reality, who turn to the phantasies of the not wholly normal spirit for their ideals and their consolations.
It must not be supposed, however, that the transition to this style of the Decadence was a suddenone. The painters who had most perfectly assimilated the style of Kiyonaga were the very ones who, in this period, turned to the depiction of figures in which every line betrays the weariness of the hour and its craving for novelty. The apex of creative energy in this art had been reached and the inevitable decline was under way.
Of the forces that produced this decline we have comparatively little knowledge. Fenollosa's account of the social conditions of the period throws some light upon the problem. "It was," he says, "a period of crisis in Tokugawa affairs. The cleavage between the aristocratic and the plebeian strata of Japanese life, which had become placidly conscious of itself in the days of Genroku, now threatened a moral, a social, if not a political disruption. The new factors of popular education—art, prints, illustrated books, the theatre, novels, contact with the Dutch at Nagasaki—all had stimulated the spirit of inquiry and of unrest which had penetrated back in investigation to the facts of the Shogun's usurpation; which wrote new, popular histories of the national life; which gave plays and novels a semi-political aim. This deeper wave of self-consciousness on the part of the people was met by the authorities with sterner repressions. The better elements that might have drifted into improving the popular standards in pleasure and art were driven out by a strict censorship. There was thus a sort of natural, or unnatural, selection which tended to isolate and give prominence to the coarser side of the popular feeling. If the issue were squarely made betweenConfucius and rank demoralization, there was little resource for the commoner but to choose the latter. Thus there arose a sort of alliance between the theatre and the houses of pleasure on the one hand, and the disaffected among the literary and political agitators upon the other. Men, great men who sowed the seeds of the revolution which ripened in 1868, had to flee for asylum, not to Buddhist temples, but to the labyrinths of the Yoshiwara, where, in the care of a romantic love lavished upon them by its then highly cultivatedhetairæ, they could print and disperse, from their hidden presses, seditious tracts which set the heart of the nation on fire. It was not the ideals of a ripe self-consciousness, such as Kiyonaga had attempted; it was a struggle of living desires against outworn conventions and hopeless tyrannies. Hence, the two phases of a new Ukioye art—its pressure outward toward fuller scientific realisms, and its frank recreations in the vulgarities of its surroundings."
In addition to the restlessness growing out of such political conditions, we should remember that it is not the nature of the human race to be satisfied even with perfection for very long. Kiyonaga, with all his placid beauty, could not forever suffice men who felt themselves to be living as passionately "modern" lives as we do to-day. Change was required to keep them interested; and since the idealization of sound vitality could hardly be pushed farther than Kiyonaga had taken it, the obvious path for the artist lay in the direction of fantastic variations on the old theme and in the idealization of the erotic phantoms evoked byuneasy weariness. New refinements had to be introduced; new emotions had to be stirred; and the unending search for novelty led in due time to strained efforts, perverted mannerisms, and distorted outlooks upon life.
So much for that part of the decadence which was due merely to the desire for change. But there was another element of even more definite operation. It is fairly clear that part of the fatal development resulted from that slow drift toward realism which we have seen growing, period by period, since the days of the Primitives. The age of Harunobu, with its new technical resources, had abandoned pure decoration and aspired to put into its designs something of the flavour of life. The age of Kiyonaga, with its complete mastery of technique, had projected into its designs its observation of real beings—drawn with a fine idealization, but nevertheless based on a deep fidelity to concrete forms. The age of Utamaro had a choice of only two steps left to take if it were to advance to any new position—a step in the direction of still closer fidelity to nature, or a step in the direction of complete revolt from naturalism into regions of wild phantasy. Characteristically, it took both!
Particular instances will show this. Utamaro and Sharaku recorded the peculiarities of real things with a sharpness of observation and an accuracy of rendering that the earlier artists had never approached. And at the same time they used these sharply mastered details of nature as mere brick and mortar out of which to construct fantastic edifices of themost unbridled imagination. Because they were geniuses, they did this and created masterpieces; but they left to later times and lesser artists only the sterile heritage of a deadening realism which they had found it convenient to employ, but to which they themselves had never been truly subject.
At the beginning of this period Yeishi, Choki, Sharaku, and the young Utamaro produced work that ranks quite as high in beauty as that of preceding days. Yeishi's visionary figures of women, drawn with a disembodied and fragile grace, are in their way matchless things, whose only fault is their lack of virile strength. Choki's finest works are wholly beyond praise. Sharaku, the supreme master of actor-portraits and one of the great artists of the world, created designs of stupendous power; if there is any trace of decadence in him it is not weakness but brutality. Utamaro, in his earlier years at least, was as wholesome as Kiyonaga; and even when, in later times, he turned to figures that have about them an indescribable atmosphere of languor and decline, he made of them designs that are to many people the most beautiful productions of the whole school. In all of these men, technical power and sense of composition were of unimpaired vigour. Why, then it may be asked, should we speak of the decadence?
The answer lies partly in the fact that these productions, as a rule, express in their languid or overstrained figures tendencies of emotional super-refinement and nervous tension that impress every beholder with a sense of disintegration, and partly in the history of later days. For the moment, therivalry between the great men of the period was so keen as to sustain what was, after all, the dying effort of their art. The successes of each one spurred the others on to new types and new feverish devices, feeding thus the flames of the desire for novelty among the people. But the end was at hand. By 1800, in the later work of Utamaro, in most of the work of Toyokuni, and in practically all the work of their followers, genuine artistic weakness appeared, sensationalism took the place of vigour, garishness supplanted harmony, and crude emotions, crude drawing, crude colour became the common feature. The ancient sense of style gave way to a desire to push pictorial effects beyond their legitimate boundary, and the edge of the abyss was in sight.
But before that moment came there remained sixteen years in the productions of which we shall find beauties less sane and sound than those of Kiyonaga, but nevertheless perpetually delighting.
Portrait of a Woman.