Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Buncho.

Connected by association with the school of Shunsho, yet lifted by his originality to a place quite apart from it, is the artist Ippitsusai Buncho. His master, a certain Ishikawa Kogen (or Yukimoto) of the classical Kano School, seems to have meant little to him; from the beginning of his production, about 1765, Shunsho's and Harunobu's influence chiefly guided him. He and Shunsho jointly published in 1770 three volumes of actor-portraits enclosed in fans. Little is known of his life except that he was originally a Samurai; he is said to have turned from his original master to the Ukioye School and to have led a life of dissipation until eventually his friends persuaded him to abandon such things and procured for him the honorary title of Hokyo. After this, we hear nothing of him. He died in 1796.

IPPITSUSAI BUNCHO.

Buncho's work attracts the observer with a charm different from that of any other Ukioye artist. A curious mannerism in his way of drawing faces and a fascinating perverse grace in the attitudes of his figures mark his prints. Practically all his work is in the hoso-ye form. His subjects are chiefly young male actors in the rôles of women. Harunobu's influence, manifest in [Plate 22], brought him grace but not sweetness. There is an astringent quality in his work that prevents it from ever being serene. His figures, whose line-work is the apotheosis of suavity and studied refinement, are arched into slightly strained and tortured attitudes; complex forces seem to dominate them like unseen winds; consuming or delicate passions move obscurely through their limbs and faces. Their heads poise at unnatural angles as if consciously turning their indifferent eyes from the spectacle of common things toward a secret and hypnotizing world of their own. These alien beings haunt one; it seems as if they had some mystery to reveal, some disturbing wonder to communicate could one but make them speak.

BUNCHO: COURTESAN AND HER ATTENDANT IN SNOWSTORM.
Size 12 × 5½. Signed Ippitsusai Buncho ga. Mansfield Collection.

Plate 22.

Part of Buncho's strangeness lies in the fact that he seeks for his figures not a human but an abstract and geometrical grace. His famous print, often reproduced, of the actor Segawa Kikunojo as a lady in white carrying an orange umbrella beneath a willow-tree, is a study in the harmonics of pure line; to this end every other element of representation has been sacrificed. Line exists here not merely to bound a form but for its own inherent beauty. Buncho is the greatest of all masters of the geometry of lines and spaces; these have, as he arranges them, the inevitability and clarity of a mathematical demonstration.

His use of colour is equally notable and strange. By employing tints that are almost discords he produces arresting and fascinating effects. His combinations of orange and slaty grey, or dull red and slaty blue and pale yellow, or pink and purple, have an uncanny vibrancy that makes them stand out in one's memory.

Buncho's strangeness has a further aspect. There is in him an intangible spiritual abnormality. I am led to localize this in his portraits of the actor Segawa Kikunojo, and to imagine a curious relation between the two. Some of his portraits of this actor are the flower of his work. In them appears a passionately rarefied beauty; they have an unusual pitch, like the overstrained vibration of violin strings stirred by some heavy blow. Segawa Kikunojo was the foremost woman-impersonator of his time. His grace in such rôles is attested by prints from the hands of many artists; but none rise to the unearthly beauty of Buncho's. Even if we knew nothing of the life of the Japanese stage at this time, or of the custom of actors like Segawa Kikunojo to dress and live like women when off the stage, we might still be put on inquiry by the peculiar ethereal quality of some of these portraits. For art whose initial impulse lies in morbid regions often flies into regions of the most disembodied spirituality for expression. Flowers of the morass frequently have a pale delicacy that is alien to the flowers of the field.

It is, however, with a confession of fancifulness that I reconstruct the following story to account for Buncho. He, a Samurai, was driven by keen artistic sensibility to the study of painting under a classical master. From this studio he was lured by the glitter and glamour of Ukioye into the world of prints and actors, and sank into a slough of dissipation above which gleamed the balefully beautiful star of Segawa Kikunojo. Haunted by a perverse susceptibility, his tense-strung nerves vibrated at that morbid touch into notes of such disembodied sweetness as the world has scarcely known elsewhere; and at last he passed into retirement and death, still the puppet of a disturbing illusion. He was an unbalanced temperament, a dreamer of keen and attenuated beauty that has nothing in common with the normal wholesome life of earth.

SHUNYEI: AN ACTOR.
Grey background. Size 14 × 9½. Signed Shunyei ga.

Plate 23.

His prints are exceedingly rare; many a good collection possesses not a single fine specimen of his work. I had never seen or heard of a pillar-print by him until very recently; but lately an interesting one has been found in Japan.