Toyohiro.
A Group of Ladies.
O careless passer—O look deep!
These forms from near the sea of sleep
Come hither; on each forehead gleams
The phosphorescent spray of dreams.
They have sailed in from lonely seas
Cloaked in a haze of mysteries;
And hither by a lord are led
Who snared them, pale himself with dread,
Upon the very shores of sleep.
O careless passer-by, look deep!
Utagawa Toyohiro, sometimes also called Ichiriusai, was born in 1773; he was a brother, fellow-student, and probably pupil of Toyokuni. It is well known that about 1800 these two artists collaborated to some extent. Toyohiro's own chief work—landscapes, book-illustrations not unlike Hokusai's, and figures of women—was done between 1795 and 1820; he died in the year 1828.
TOYOHIRO.
Fate has been unkind to him in associating him with a man tremendously more productive and incomparably more popular in his own day than himself. Even to the present time, the reputation of Toyokuni still overshadows that of his brother. But the close student of Toyohiro's work will probably come to the conclusion that this present difference in fame is due less to difference in merit than to the fact that Toyokuni was enormously prolific, while Toyohiro's work was scanty. The contemporaneous popularity may be ascribed to the ability of Toyokuni to shift and veer with every change in the public taste, while Toyohiro was unable or unwilling to move with these fluctuating winds. It is reported that a serious breach occurred between the brothers because of Toyohiro's refusal to produce actor-prints as the popular taste demanded. His work is, however, coming to be recognized as of a quality at least equal to his brother's, and in some respects finer and more truly the expression of a rare sense of beauty.
We may conjecture that Toyohiro inherited two things from his first teacher Toyoharu. One was a leaning toward landscape drawing. The other was a certain distinction and shy aloofness that marked the older master.
All Toyohiro's work has an aristocratic touch, a fine subtlety of curve and colour, that contrast markedly with the frequently blaring compositions of Toyokuni. He seldom drew actors or courtesans; most of his figures are ladies of birth and breeding. The beautiful spots of black which are important elements in the majority of his compositions are handled with a keen sense of contrast that not even Kiyonaga's surpassed. His brushwork is firm and delicate, but not so sparkling with vitality as that of some of his predecessors. His colours are soft, his figures wonderfully graceful; the impression he produces upon one is that of a subtle and beauty-hungry spirit, detached from the mob by a refinement beyond their comprehension, driven on by a consuming passion, devoted to the quest of a perfection he was able to project but not to realize.
In style, he draws considerably upon Toyokuni's early Utamaro manner; but in spirit he is nearer to Yeishi and Utamaro himself, both of whom must have influenced him somewhat. Not even the work of Yeishi is so saturated with the wistfulness for beauty, the sense of vanishing loveliness, the homesickness for regions of otherwhere. One of his triptychs, the "Daimyo's Kite Party," reproduced in [Plate 48], so embodies these qualities that it is worthy of special attention.
TOYOHIRO: A DAIMYO'S KITE-PARTY.
Triptych. Each sheet size 15 × 10. Signed Toyohiro ga.
Plate 48.
In a landscape of green hills, where a circle of low slopes encloses a space of level ground, stands, on the rising edge of that natural amphitheatre, a group of noble ladies and children in the soft brightness of festal attire—richly decorated pink, black, white, translucent heliotrope. Below and behind them boys are manœuvring a kite, and older men direct briskly. The ladies for whom this simple and charming pastime is arranged do not seem wholly intent upon it. Their tall slender figures move as if in abstraction, an isolated group in the foreground. One grey cherry-tree, with gnarled branches etched against a clear sky, stands in their midst, bare except for the pink of earliest blossoms; and the pale green of the more distant encircling hills is here and there touched with the same luminous flowers.
Across this landscape the slender figures move in slow procession. Their robes sway about them slowly. These sweeping draperies, which Harunobu would have charged with peace and solemnity, are here touched with the tension of more unquiet curves, restless, troubled with some element of torture in their beauty. These are the lines of the branch and of the wave, bent by the strain of hidden and conflicting forces. The clear festive brightness of pink cherry-blossoms with the light of spring shining through them serves but to accentuate the faint melancholy of the trailing figures on whom lies a wistfulness that no spring can satisfy. They linger, exquisitely aimless; beautiful, and weary for a yet-unattained beauty; happy, but grave with the shadow of fleeting happiness; sad, though reconciled by the knowledge that beauty is half sadness. They have walked with expectant steps to the edge of the world; and now they pace, delicately wondering, not far from the abyss where there is nothing. Autumn will always be to them cold and unkindred; yet in the flush of the spring their thoughts will turn toward death and autumn. One cannot imagine them wholly joyous. They seem haunted by a nostalgia for remote delights, unearthly music, secret and dimly remembered gardens. Strange, late, exotic flowers are these, whom a pensiveness not known to simpler and sturdier natures disturbs with futile dreams.
A similar feeling is so often repeated in Toyohiro's work that I venture to regard it as the keynote of his genius.
Toyohiro's landscapes are without notable beauty. He had a habit of cutting across the middle of his picture with wide streaks of white mist—an unpleasant device adopted to produce the effect of distance. He is, however, an historical link of great importance between his master, Toyoharu, and his pupil, Hiroshige, the greatest of all landscape painters. As a conduit of landscape painting at a time when the Ukioye School was little given to this as a separate study, Toyohiro's work in this field may well engage our attention; but one suspects that it is the fame of his great pupil's landscapes rather than the intrinsic merit of his own that has given his their prominence.
Toyohiro produced a few pillar-prints of birds which have great distinction; an almost classic feeling marks some of them.
Toyohiro's prints are not numerous; Toyokuni's outnumber his twenty to one. His pillar-prints are very rare; his triptychs are generally notable. It is necessary to add, however, that poor impressions of his work, printed in poor colours, are more common than any other kind.
VII
THE FIFTH PERIOD:
THE DOWNFALL
FROM THE
DEATH OF UTAMARO
TO THE
DEATH OF HIROSHIGE
(1806-1858)
CHAPTER VII
THE FIFTH PERIOD: THE DOWNFALL
From the Death of Utamaro to the Death of Hiroshige (1806-1858)
When Utamaro died, in 1806, the great days of the figure-print were ended. There were to be no more Harunobus or Kiyonagas or Sharakus—only a horde of little men whose work retained few traces of the earlier greatness. And our serious interest in the art as a whole must end here. Were it not for the superb renaissance of landscape which this period includes, side by side with the decay of figure-designing, it would be my choice to mark this date as the end of our history.
The causes of the degradation of prints in this period appear to have been of several natures. For one, the accidents that regulate the birth of geniuses operated unkindly, and few artists of first-rate talent came to take the places of the dead masters. Further, the colour-print had gone somewhat out of fashion among its original public, and the people who now bought were chiefly of a lower and more ignorant class than the purchasers of Kiyonaga's day. To the less exacting but eager demands of this class the publishers catered with coarser designs, cruder colours, and more careless printing. Now, in literal truth, the print-designer was the artisan; and amid the vast flood of commonplace productions of the time it is difficult to search out those few works that have a claim to beauty.
It is probable that a general loss in refinement of taste marked the epoch and was reflected in the prints. The uncouth flaring designs of the textiles, the gross overladen coiffures, the excess of decoration that lay like a blight over all the instruments of life at this time, naturally had their influence upon the standards of the artist.
Furthermore, the movement toward realism here reached its climax. Dominated by Hokusai's earlier work, the artists abandoned the old traditional devotion to stylistic restraint and went madly in chase of a distorted kind of literal truth that had no relation to beauty. Men who were too impotent to create visions nobly and too dull to observe reality keenly attempted to conceal their double weakness by a double evasion—spoiling what claim their work had to idealistic imagination by touches of crude realism, and ruining it as realism by the most grotesque aberrations of fancy. In the sphere of erotic prints this was characteristically and repellently manifest. Certain examples of this type, produced in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, surpass in grossness even the most studied of European specimens. In landscape alone has the period something of the highest charm to offer us.