Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Shuncho.

Your lovely ladies shall not fade
Though Yedo's moated walls be laid
Level with dust, and night-owls brood
Over 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 stand
Of your once-golden wonderland?
Perhaps shall Nikko crumble down,
Its carvings worn, its glow turned brown
Through many winters. On that hill
Where great Ieyasu's brazen will
In brazen tomb now takes its rest,
Perhaps the eagle's young shall nest.
Kyoto's gardens cannot last.
At Kamakura, where the vast
Form of the Buddha fronts the sea,
A waste of waves may someday be....
Ah, stale and flat the warning bell
Whose melancholy accents tell
Impermanence to hearts that guess
Time's undiscovered loveliness.
A fairer Yedo shall arise;
A richer Nikko praise the skies;
Ieyasus mightier than of old
Shall cast the world in wiser mould;
Fresh gardens shall be spread; new faith
Shall spring when Buddha is a wraith—
And more puissant hands than yours
Shall paint anew life's ancient lures.
Yet when he comes who shall surpass
Your 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 wise
In 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 certain peculiarities 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 in [Plate 31], comprise chiefly figures of women, drawn with extraordinary grace of line and softness of colouring.

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 styles of 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.
Size 17 × 4½.
Signed Shuncho ga.

SHUNCHO: THE COURTESAN HANA-ŌJI—THE SUMIDA RIVER SEEN THROUGH THE WINDOW.
Size 27 × 5.
Signed Shuncho 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; but Shuncho 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.
Size 26 × 4½.
Unsigned.

YEISHO: TWO COURTESANS AFTER THE BATH.
Size 25 × 5.
Signed Yeisho 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 Plates [32] and [33], 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.