Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Koriusai.

Koriusai speaks.

Let whoso will take sheets as wide
As some great wrestler's mountain-back
Space cannot hide
His lack.

Take thou the panel, being strong.
'Tis as a girl's arm fashioned right—
As slender and divinely long
And white.

That tall and narrow icy space
Gives scope for all the brush beseems.
And who shall ask a wider place
For dreams?

It is an isle amid the tide—
A chink wherethrough shines one lone star—
A cell where calms of heaven hide
Afar.

One chosen curve of beauty wooed
From out the harsh chaotic world
Shall there in solitude
Be furled.

The narrow door shall be so strait
Life cannot vex, with troubled din,
Beauty, beyond that secret gate
Shut in.

Lo! I will draw two lovers there,
Alone amid their April hours,
With lines as drooping and as fair
As flowers.

I will make Spring to circle them
Like a faint aureole of delight.
Their luminous youth and joy shall stem
The night.

And men shall say: Behold! he chose,
From Time's wild welter round him strown,
This hour; and paid for its repose
His own.

Koriusai's life is shrouded in those mists prevalent in the cases of most Ukioye artists. It is known that he was a Samurai, or feudal retainer of knightly rank; upon the death of his master, Tsuchiya, he became, as was the custom, a ronin—that is, a retainer without a lord—and established himself near the picturesque Ryogoku Bridge in Yedo as a painter. He originally used the name Haruhiro. Shigenaga was his first teacher, Harunobu his second; his work can safely be dated between 1770 and 1781. By the end of this period Kiyonaga was beginning to advance achievements that eclipsed Koriusai's. As Fenollosa points out, it was Koriusai's misfortune to collide with Harunobu at the beginning and with Kiyonaga at the end of his career; could we obliterate those two, we might think of Koriusai as "the most beautiful Ukioye designer."

KORIUSAI: MOTHER AND BOY.
Size 28 × 4½.
Signed Koriu ga

KORIUSAI: TWO LOVERS IN THE FIELDS—SPRING CUCKOO.
Size 27 × 4½.
Signed Koriusai ga.

Plate 16.

Koriusai was already working in Harunobu's manner at the time of the master's death; and afterward he continued Harunobu's experiments. His characteristic device in colour is the predominance of a strong orange pigment, based on lead, which when originally applied had the utmost brilliance, but which now is frequently changed by chemical decomposition into a rich mottled black. Combining this orange with a blue of his own devising, he obtained novel and striking effects.

KORIUSAI.

Koriusai's small prints have often a beauty almost equal to Harunobu's, but they lack individuality of invention. They never surpass the triumphs of the older master in this form. Koriusai seldom can catch Harunobu's perfect grace and repose, his luminous atmosphere and subtle colour. But in his large sheets he produced a few compositions whose elaborate magnificence is a new and individual achievement. The styles in hair-dressing which came into vogue at this time were no small element in enabling him to create his stately figures; the wide lines of the coiffure, more solid and massive than in Harunobu's day, lent itself admirably to strong decorative treatment. In a series of large sheets called "Designs of Spring Greenery," each picture representing an Oiran and her two or more young attendants, some of the prints are disfigured by the heaviness of the faces; but others, from which this exaggeration is absent, are of almost unparalleled splendour in colour, even though somewhat monotonous in their repetitions. One of this type, in the Morse Collection, Evanston (described at No. 155 of Fenollosa's Ketcham Catalogue) is surely one of the greatest prints in the world. Some of Koriusai's designs of birds and other animals, occasionally printed with mica backgrounds, are admirable compositions.

But Koriusai's distinctive glory lies in the sphere of pillar-prints, of which five are reproduced in Plates [16], [17], and [18]. This form of composition is one of the most interesting and exacting to be found in the art of any race; the tall sheet, generally about 28 inches high and only 5 inches wide, furnishes a mere ribbon of space that taxes all the resources of a designer. It is like a Greek frieze placed on end; but whereas the frieze gives space for a multitude of processional figures, and is essentially a stage for the depiction of a social pageant, this slim panel demands the exclusion of all but a few significant lines. In this particular it is the finest of art-forms. It exacts the quintessence of selection—one narrow glimpse of some cross-section of life. Its limitations are like those of the lyric, requiring a concentrated and finely chosen vision.

KORIUSAI: TWO LADIES.
Size 29 × 5.
Signed Koriu ga.

KORIUSAI: A GAME OF TAG.
Size 26 × 5.
Signed Koriusai ga.

Plate 17.

The shape was first devised by Okumura Masanobu as a modification of the wider and shorter sheets commonly used by the Primitives for their large pictures. As is often the case in the evolution of a fine art-form, it was not Masanobu's mere whim, but structural exigencies, that prompted the invention, the need being to provide long narrow pictures that could be hung upon the square wooden pillar of the Japanese house. Kiyomitsu and Toyonobu used this shape admirably; and the final and most perfect form for its dimensions was fixed and brought into general use by Harunobu. It became a favourite shape among the greatest of the later artists; and no small number of their supreme achievements are in this form. To the modern European eye, no other seems so distinctively characteristic of the special Japanese genius.

Pillar-prints are almost invariably works of the first importance—pièces de résistance, deliberate and studied productions, representing the best effort and highest powers of the artist. For they were intended to be mounted and rolled, like kakemono; and the artist could therefore foresee for them a degree of attention that he could hardly expect in the case of the loose square sheets. The peculiar shape is in itself so interesting and beautiful, and so ringing a challenge to the powers of the designer, that in many cases the best work of the artist is to be found only in this form.

Pillar-prints are to-day far rarer than prints of the square variety. They were probably produced in editions of smaller numbers than the square prints; and, further, the use to which they were put as hanging pictures exposed them to hazardous vicissitudes and generally resulted in eventual destruction.

Koriusai's variations on the limited themes whose treatment is possible in this narrow space display daring, originality, and power of concentrated selection. He is the supreme master of the pillar-print; no one else has produced so many fine ones, and practically all his finest work is in this form. The infinite variety of his designs and the fertility of his invention make a series of his pillar-prints one of the most absorbing features of a fine collection. In one print ([Plate 17]), he dashes the intense black line of a screen down through the middle of his picture and sets the delicate eddies of a child's and a young girl's garments playing around its base. In a second ([Plate 18]), a girl in robes of gorgeous colour stands like a calm peacock, with glowing orange combs alight in her hair; while in a third ([Plate 16]), the whole space waves and sings with the forms of grasses, a flying cuckoo, and a maiden carried in the arms of her lover through fields of spring. And in a fourth ([Plate 17]), he draws the figures of two women, one behind and a little above the other, the one in the background luminous with soft neutral tints, the one in the foreground robed in a black whose intensity cuts sharply through the otherwise monotonous sweetness of the picture. To the grace of Harunobu, Koriusai has here added a vigour all his own, and a richness surpassing that of his teacher.

To-day Koriusai's small prints are rather rare, as are also the birds and the large-size sheets. His pillar-prints, which are his greatest works, were produced in such numbers that, contrary to the rule that applies to the pillar-prints of all other designers, a good many of them have survived. It is still possible to secure examples that are among the foremost of all print treasures.

SHIGEMASA: TWO LADIES.
Size 28½ × 5.
Unsigned.

KORIUSAI: A COURTESAN.
Size 27 × 4½.
Signed Koriusai ga.

Plate 18.