Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Hosoda Yeishi.

Portrait of a Woman.

Out of the silence of dead years
Your slender presence seems to move—
A fragrance that no time outwears—
A perilous messenger of love.

From far your wistful beauty brings
A wonder that no lips may speak—
A music dumb save as it clings
About your shadowy throat and cheek.

Longing is round you like that haze
Of luminous and tender glow
Which memory in the later days
Gives vanished days of long ago.

And he who sees you must retrace
All sweetness that his life has known,
And with the vision of your face
Link some lost vision of his own.

The long curves of your saffron dress—
The outline of your delicate mould—
Your strange unearthly slenderness
Seem like a wraith's that strayed of old

Out of some region where abide
Fortunate spirits without stain,
Where nothing lovely is denied,
And pain is only beauty's pain.

. . . . . .

Strange! that in life you were a thing
Common to many for delight,
Thrall to the revelries that fling
Their gleam across the fevered night—

A holy image in the grasp
Of pagans careless to adore;
A pearl secreted in the clasp
Of oozy weeds on some lost shore.

My thought shrinks back from what I see,
And wanders dumb in poisoned air—
Then leaps, inexplicably free,
Remembering that you were fair!

. . . . . .

Belovèd were you in your prime
By one, of all, who came as guest,—
A wastrel strange, whose gaze could climb
To where your beauty lit the west.

One,—in whose secret heart there moved
Some far and unforgotten stir
Of ancient, holy beauties loved,—
Here paused, a sudden worshipper.

Methinks he moved in dusks apart
Through that profound and trembling hour
When you within his doubting heart
Touched all the desert into flower.

And where you rose a world's delight,
For him the dark veils from you fell,—
As earthly clouds from star-strewn night
Withdraw, and leave a miracle.

Not Oiran then, but maid; remote
From tyrant powers of waste desire.
Who drew these hands, this slender throat,
Saw you 'mid skaken winds of fire.

You were a shape of wonder, set
To crown the seeking of his days.
For you his lonely eyes were wet;
With you his soul walked shrouded ways.

And though the burning night might keep
You servient to some lord's carouse,
For him you rose from such a deep
With maiden dawn-light on your brows.

. . . . . .

Pale Autumn with ethereal glow
Hovered your delicate figure near;
And ever round you whispered low
Her voices, and the dying year.

A year—a day—and then the leaves
Purpureal, ashen, umber, red,
Wove for you both through waning eves
A gorgeous carpet gloomward spread.

And with that waning, you had gone,
Through changes that love fears to trace—
No later lover could have known
Your wistful and alluring face—

Your music, quivering in thin air,
Had fled with life that filled your veins—
But he for whom you were so fair
Dreamed; and the troubled dream remains.

. . . . . .

Time, that is swift to smite and rend
The common things that spring from earth,
Dares not so surely set an end
To shapes of visionary birth.

There often his destroying touch
Lingers as with a lulled caress,
Adding, to that which has so much,
An alien ghostly loveliness.

So shall your beauty, crescent, pass
From me through many a later hand,
Each year more luminous than it was—
O April out of Sunset Land!

The career of Hosoda Yeishi as a print-designer began about 1780 at the time when Kiyonaga was in full sway, and lasted until shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century—a date when Kiyonaga had for some years been in retirement. Thus in Yeishi perhaps more fully than in any other artist except Utamaro may be observed the crucial transition from the period of Kiyonaga to the period of complete decline.

YEISHI.

Yeishi was originally a noble of high rank who studied under Kano Yeisen, the court painter; and not even in the last years of his career, when vulgarizing influences were dominant, did he lose the refinement and aristocratic delicacy that are his most striking characteristics. Shortly before he became a Ukioye painter he had been attached to the household of the Shogun Iyeharu. It is not difficult to imagine the horror of Yeishi's early circle of associates when he threw over conventionality and station, and plunged into the vie de Bohème of a popular painter. "This youth," remarks Fenollosa, "doubtless shocked all his friends in tiring of the solemn old Chinese poets who had been gliding about in impossible landscapes since Tanyu first labelled them, and of the semi-serious, long-headed old gods who gave knowing winks to their turtles and storks, and in running off to such abominable haunts of the cow-headed Buddhist Satan as Danjuro's theatre-pit, fragrant with the odours of saki and raw fish, or the lantern-hung balconies of merry damsels on the river-boats."

But the elegant court gentleman was not destined to sink in the maelstrom. To this underworld he brought his own subtlety of vision and evoked from it figures of unfading beauty. At the outset Kiyonaga was his guide—a guide perhaps too blindly followed. Certainly Yeishi's first productions, superb as they were, cannot be called his most characteristic. [Plate 35] is an example. They are wholly in the Kiyonaga manner except that they have a touch of fragility and delicacy that is alien to Kiyonaga. The proportions of the figures are the same, but Yeishi's curves are less naturalistic; they seem the product of one whose hungry visions lapped like waves against the shore of reality, shaping it into contours determined by their own demands. The "feeling of repose" which Mr. Strange notes is not repose at all but weariness. At first the perfect poise of these forms may deceive us; but as we advance along the calendar of Yeishi's work we find it pervaded by a spirit less serene, more high-strung, more drugged with beauty than was Kiyonaga's.

YEISHI: THREE LADIES BY THE SEASHORE.
One sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. Signed Yeishi ga.

Plate 35.

In what we may call Yeishi's second style, he gives the peculiarities of his nature full expression. The tall slender figures cease to recall Kiyonaga's; the robust vigour goes out of them; they become impalpable, wistful creatures, hovering before us with slow grace, moving by us in grave procession. These beautiful women are like creatures seen in a dream; they have the solemnity and aloofness of priestesses intent on the performance of secret rites. Their long robes sweep in stately pageant; their delicate heads bend in exquisite weariness.

Fenollosa strangely speaks of the "keenness of Yeishi's characterizations," and says that, "with no idealizations to trouble him, he put down what he saw as frankly as a young reporter." This is a surprising misinterpretation. Yeishi was perhaps more notably a visionary than any other Ukioye artist; he was haunted by supersensible intimations, perverted by a search for unearthly beauty. A fascinating painter! He has not the brilliancy and versatility of Utamaro; but the taste is hard to please which finds monotony in his series of perfections. In his second period—his most individual and powerful—he produced compositions that are hardly inferior to Kiyonaga's. Yeishi may be regarded as one of the few designers who perfectly mastered the triptych form. His arrangements are simpler than Kiyonaga's but no less beautiful. A notable series depicting various polite occupations from the life of Prince Genji are so harmonious in design, so lovely in colour, and so instinct with spiritual refinement as to rank among his finest works. In some of these triptychs Yeishi introduces his interesting colour-invention—a scheme of grey, yellow, violet, blue, and black, which he handles superbly. Among his other triptychs, "The Treasure Ship" is especially notable. In this print, a barge whose prow is shaped like the head and breast of the mythical Hoho bird seems adrift on a river of peace; its wonderful freight—nine noble ladies engaged in the refined entertainments of paintings, games, and poetry—express the nostalgia of Watteau's figures and the line-beauty of Botticelli's. The repose of heaven is upon them, and the delicate satiety of heavenly beings.

Yeishi was one of the few painters besides Shunman who successfully managed grey as a dominant tone. In certain of his prints he produced notable results in this manner, using a style in which lights of yellow and purple are arranged with beautiful effect. Sometimes, though rarely, he omitted them altogether, as in [Plate 37], and contented himself with modulations of pure grey that are the last word in subtlety.

YEISHI: LADY WITH TOBACCO-PIPE.
Yellow background. Size × 10. [Transcriber's note: Dimension missing in original.] Signed Yeishi ga.

Plate 36.

He produced a considerable number of notable full-size sheets depicting single figures of women seated or kneeling, engaged in gracious occupations such as flower-arrangement. Some of these are without background; others have backgrounds of pale grey wash; while still others, perhaps the finest of all, stand out against luminous yellow grounds. One of these appears in [Plate 36]. In these prints is displayed Yeishi's power to draw exquisitely the long sweeping curves of draperies; and the strangely pensive, hieratic quality of his faces is at its best. Their charm lies not in the brushwork, which is never as free and bold as Kiyonaga's, but in the sentiment of remote beauty of which these haunting curves are such pure symbols. He also produced a number of groups of courtesans on parade, with little or no background, after the fashion inaugurated by Koriusai and Kiyonaga. These appear stiff beside Kiyonaga's; but they have nevertheless great charm of line and colour. His album of the Thirty-six Poetesses, about 1800, is a series of fantastic and gorgeous colour-dreams. His series of standing women against chocolate or silver backgrounds rises in colour to the level of Sharaku.

Yeishi could not, however, escape the influence of the growing decadence. The public taste at the end of the eighteenth century was debased by a craving for gaudy eccentricities. Utamaro led in the rush to gratify this craving; and even the aristocratic Yeishi was unable to resist the general decline. Therefore toward the end of his career as a print-designer his work greatly altered. His figures grew very tall and willowy; their necks became so exaggeratedly thin that they seem unable to support the great pile of the coiffure; an attenuated snakyness distinguishes their lines; and the curves of their garments are distorted into the most fantastic folds and swirls. It was in this period that Yeishi produced most of his large bust-portraits on yellow or mica grounds; in these he followed the lead of Utamaro, who had influenced him considerably during his whole career. The noble and grave faces of his earlier days became wooden and distorted; and when Yeishi at last stopped print-designing and returned to the life of society and painting from which he had been so long a renegade, the loss was not a great one; for the degradation of the age's taste had engulfed him—as, indeed, it did all his contemporaries.

Yeishi's ordinary work is not particularly rare. Even his slightest prints have so much charm that they may be highly recommended to the attention of the modest collector. Yeishi's important works are of great scarcity. His figures on yellow or mica ground, his grey prints, his large heads, and his pillar-prints are quite as difficult to obtain as any of the prints of this or the preceding period; his best triptychs are extraordinarily hard to procure.

YEISHI: INTERIOR OPENING ON TO THE SEASHORE.
Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Printed in several tones of grey. Size 15 × 10.
Signed Yeishi ga. Metzgar Collection.

Plate 37.