Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Utamaro.

Portrait of a Woman.

In robes like clouds of sunset rolled
About the dying sun,
In splendid vesture of purple and gold
That a thousand toiling days have spun
For thee, O imperial one!—

With the cunning pomp of the later years,
With their pride and glory and stress,
Thou risest; and thy calm forehead bears
These like a crown; but thy frail mouth wears
All of their weariness.

Thou art one of the great who mayest stand
Where Cleopatra stood:
Aspasia, Rhodope, at each hand;
And even the proud tempestuous mood
Of Sappho shall rule thy blood.

Thy throat, in its slender whiteness bare,
Seems powerless to sustain
The gorgeous tower of thy gold-decked hair—
Like a lily's stem which the autumn air
Maketh to shrink and wane.

More haunting music, more luring love
Round thy sinuous form hold sway
Than the daughters of earth have knowledge of
For thou art the daughter of fading day,
Touched with all hope's decay.

And the subtle languor, the prismic glow
Of a ripeness overpast
Burns through the wonderful curving flow
Of thy garments; and they who love thee know
A loathing at the last.

For they are the lovers of living things—
Stars, sunlight, morning's breath;
But thou, for all that thy beauty brings
Such songs as the summer scattereth—
Thou art of the House of Death.

. . . . . .

But there was one in thy golden day
Who saw thy poppied bloom,
And loved not thee but the heart's decay
That filled thee, and clasped it to be alway
His chosen and sealèd doom.

He who this living portrait wrought,
Outlasting time's control,
A dark and bitter nectar sought
Welling from poisoned streams that roll
Through deserts of the soul.

Ah, dreamer! come at last where dreams
Can serve no more thy need,
Who hast by such bright silver streams
Walked with thy soul that now earth seems
A waste where love must bleed—

Thou whom such matchless beauty filled
Of visions frail and lone,
For thee all passion now is stilled;
Thy heart, denied the life it willed,
Desireth rather none.

And thee allure no verdant blooms
That with fresh joy suspire;
But blossoms touched with coming glooms,
And weariness, and spent desire,
Draw to thy spirit nigher.

Wherefore is nothing in thy sight
Propitious save it be
Brushed with the wings of hovering night,
Worn with the shadow of delight,
Sad with satiety.

For thou hast enmity toward all
The servants of life's breath;
One mistress holdeth thee in thrall,
And them thou lovest who her call
Answer; and she is Death.

. . . . . .

Now Death thy ruined city's streets
Walketh, a grisly queen.
And there her sacred horror greets
Him who invades these waste retreats,
Her sacrosanct demesne—

In robes like clouds at sunset rolled
About the dying sun,
In splendid vestments of purple and gold
That a thousand perished years have spun
For her, the Imperial One.

Utamaro, the central and in some ways the most fascinating figure of this period, has been from the first a great favourite in the esteem of European collectors. His graceful, sinuous women are the images that come most readily to the minds of many people at the mention of Japanese prints. In his own time and land his popularity was equalled by that of no other artist.

UTAMARO.

It was by his portraits of women that Utamaro won his great fame. Passing outside the influence of Kiyonaga, he developed in his designs of the last decade of the nineteenth century his characteristic feminine type. Her strange and languid beauty, the drooping lines of her robes, her unnatural slenderness and willowiness, are the emanations of Utamaro's feverish mind; as her creator he ranks as the most brilliant, the most sophisticated, and the most poetical designer of his time. His life was spent in alternation between his workshop and the haunts of the Yoshiwara, whose beautiful inhabitants he immortalized in prints that are the ultimate expression of the mortal body's longing for a more than mortal perfection of happiness. Wearied of every common pleasure, he created these visions in whose disembodied, morbid loveliness his overwrought desires found consolation.

UTAMARO: OKITA OF NANIWAYA, A TEA-HOUSE WAITRESS.
Mica background. Size 12½ × 9. Signed Utamaro, hitsu. Chandler Collection.

Plate 38.

Utamaro was born in 1753 in the province of Musachi. Early in life he went to Yedo and there studied under the noted Kano painter and book-illustrator Toriyama Sekiyen, whom some authorities say was his father. Almost from the beginning of his career he lived with the famous publisher Tsutaya, who issued his prints; and this relation continued up to the date of Tsutaya's death in 1797.

In Utamaro's early work, which began with an illustrated book in 1776, the influence of Kiyonaga was strong. Shunsho's and Kitao Masanobu's characteristics are sometimes also visible, but Kiyonaga's style is the dominating one. Some of his early work is signed Toyoaki.

In 1780 the first important product of Utamaro's career saw the light—his famous "Gifts of the Ebb-Tide"—a book of exquisitely conceived and delicately printed representations of shells and rocks on the seashore. The effort of a trained conchologist to produce accurate descriptive drawings of these objects could hardly achieve a more scrupulous fidelity than do these pages, which have in addition an æsthetic charm of a high order. The same characteristic appears in his celebrated "Insect Book" of 1788. These two works, dominated by a scientific realism that was new to Ukioye, may serve as an indication of the growth of that naturalistic spirit whose effect upon the stylistic ideals of the art was later to be so destructive.

In the decade between 1780 and 1790 Utamaro produced many additional books. Notable among them are the "Customs of New Year's Day" (1786), "The Mad Full Moon," a series of lovely moonlight landscapes in monochrome (1789), and "The Silver World," a series of delicate snow scenes (1790). The single-sheet prints which he issued during this decade are exceedingly beautiful works of a type that the inexperienced eye would never recognize as Utamaro's. The figures are like those of Kiyonaga's prime, but drawn with a slenderness of line and restlessness of poise that strikes a different and shriller note. His work of this period may be distinguished by the fact that the signature is written in a squarer, more compact, and more formal manner than the sprawling, cursive signature of his later days. The two long, tail-like lines of the later signature, by which even the casual tourist learns to recognize Utamaro's name, are wholly absent.

With 1790 begins the classic period of Utamaro's work. This was the year of Kiyonaga's retirement and, according to some authorities, of Shunsho's death. With the two giants of the older generation gone, Utamaro was left to compete for leadership with Yeishi, Shuncho, Choki, Toyokuni, and the lesser men. During the decade from 1790 to 1800 Utamaro was, except for the isolated figure of Sharaku, outstandingly the most versatile and brilliant among them. All were profoundly influenced by him, and he had not a few imitators who attempted to profit by his popularity.

UTAMARO: TWO COURTESANS.
One of a Series "Beautiful Women compared with the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road." Size 15 × 10. Signed Utamaro, hitsu.

Plate 39.

During this last decade of the nineteenth century Utamaro produced the greatest of his works. Among these must be counted the remarkable series of half-length figures on silver backgrounds, for which no admiration can be too extreme. One of them appears in [Plate 38]. The type of face which Utamaro drew in these prints differs from the Kiyonaga type; it has something of the girlishness of Harunobu or Sukenobu—wholesome, rounded, with eyes that are large and not narrowed to slits as in his later years, and with coiffure of modest proportions. It resembles the type characteristic of Choki at this time. These charming figures, drawn with subtle precision, stand against their dull silver backgrounds in colours whose few and soft tones produce an effect so harmonious as to almost justify Von Seidlitz in calling Utamaro "the first colourist of his nation." The prints of this class are as rare as they are beautiful. The collector who is familiar with nothing but the later work of the artist can have only an imperfect conception of the greatness of Utamaro. They constitute the purest and most tranquil of his productions, and perhaps the high point of his genius.

This 1790 decade, when Utamaro was at the zenith of his powers, saw many triumphs besides the silver-portraits. He was incessantly busy with experiments of every kind; pushed by the keen competition of Yeishi, Choki, and the others, he laboured incessantly for new effects and passed on to new manners. Plates [39] and [41] are examples. Discarding the type of head that had appeared in the silver-portraits, he devised that more restless, haunting type by which we best know him. The ethereal and supple bodies, the slender necks, the slightly strained poses, all indicate the nervous hyper-æsthetic tension of the hour. Toward the end of the decade his peculiarities grew even more marked. The necks of his figures became incredibly slender; the bodies took on unnatural length; a snaky languor pervaded them. One print, his famous "Woman Seated on the Edge of a Veranda," reproduced in [Plate 40], may serve as representative of them all. The drawing of the draperies and of the figure beneath them is studied with extraordinary fidelity; in fact, so human and real a figure is hardly to be found in the work of any preceding artist. But on the other hand, Utamaro has used his keen realistic power merely as a scaffolding, and has proceeded to build up on it a work that goes over almost into the region of symbolism. In the slender delicacy of this figure, the splendid black of her elaborate coiffure, the drooping fragility of her body, the sensuous grace and refinement, the languor and exhaustion—in all these speak the super-sensible gropings and hungers of Utamaro himself. Out of a living woman he created his disturbing symbol of the impossible desires that are no less subtle or painful because they are born of the flesh. With nerves keyed beyond the healthy pitch, he dreamed this melody whose strange minor chords alone could stir the satiated spirit. He caught and idealized the lines and colours of mortal weariness.

UTAMARO: WOMAN SEATED ON A VERANDA.
Size 13 × 8. Signed Utamaro, hitsu.

Plate 40.

"Woman," says Von Seidlitz, "had always played a prominent part in the popular art of the country, but now Utamaro placed one type of the sex in the absolute centre of all attention—the type, namely, of the courtesan initiated into all the refinements of mental culture as well as of bodily enchantment, and then playing in the life of Japan such a part as she must have played in Hellas during the golden age of Greek civilization. For expressing the inexpressible, the simple rendering of nature did not suffice; the figures must needs be lengthened to give the impression of supernatural beings; they must have a pliancy enabling them to express vividly the tenderest as well as the most intense emotions of the soul; lastly, they must be endowed with a wholly peculiar and therefore affected language for uttering the wholly peculiar sensations that filled them.... It is true that soon after he yielded to the general tendency of his age ... and gradually insisted on these attributes to exaggeration, even to impossibility, while his fame of having been the first to give such morbid inclinations completely satisfactory and therefore unsurpassable expression is a title of somewhat doubtful value, even if in any case a high historical significance cannot be denied it. Nevertheless, we must not forget that within this domain of the hyper-æsthetic Utamaro was the creator of a most original and individual style. Nay, if we could only admit the morbid and exaggerated to be as fit subject-matter for art as the healthy and sane, we must grant that this style is one of altogether enchanting originality, and that, however dangerous might be its immediate influence upon the spectator, and particularly upon possible successors, it does none the less lift us beyond the cramping limits of reality, and is therefore not wanting in idealism of a kind."

But weary as seems the spiritual content of these end-of-the-century designs of Utamaro's, there is no lack of brilliant vigour in their composition. The great triptychs—such as the "Night Festival on the Banks of the Sumida River," or the "Firefly Catchers," or the "Persimmon Pickers"—stand among the finest prints we know. In colour, rhythm of line, and dramatic quality of composition they are triumphs. There is a startling beauty in even those extraordinary bust-portraits in which the enormous coiffure, minute neck, slips of eyes, and dot of a mouth, carry exaggeration to a bizarre and delirious extreme.

Not long after 1800 the pressure of work brought upon him by his great popularity, together with the effects of a none too well spent life in the Yoshiwara, combined to strain his powers unduly. His work no longer kept its earlier freshness; his exaggerations became coarser; his invention grew less fertile. He began to rely on the assistance of his pupils, as we know from his "Book of the Green Houses" (1804), in which several collaborated with him. Doubtless many an Utamaro print of this time is their work.

In the year 1804 came the final catastrophe. Consequent upon the publication of the well-known triptych representing the ancient Shogun Hideyoshi entertaining his five concubines in the eastern quarter of the capital, the ruling Shogun Iyenari took umbrage at the salacious disrespect to his ancestor and the delicately implied allusion to himself, and Utamaro was thrown into prison for his offence. There he remained, it is said, for a year; when he emerged, it was with impaired health and a broken spirit.

UTAMARO: A YOUTHFUL PRINCE AND LADIES.
Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. Signed Utamaro, hitsu.

Plate 41.

His productions after this time were not comparable with his earlier work. In the year 1806 he died, and with him died the great days of the Japanese print.

In this rapid survey it has been impossible to do justice to the many-sided powers of this great designer. His beautiful landscapes, his fine animal pictures, the tender and whimsical mother-and-child and domestic scenes he produced, have all had to be ignored in favour of his central achievements—his unparalleled designs of the courtesan of the Yoshiwara in her weary glory. Certainly no more varied and distinguished talent than his illumines the roll of Ukioye artists. Beside his perpetually fresh invention even the great Kiyonaga seems stereotyped and academic.

To-day the poorer examples of Utamaro's work are still readily procurable. His greatest works are rare. Certain of his triptychs, his silver half-length portraits, and his large heads on mica backgrounds, are very uncommon. But with patience and judgment the collector may still obtain now and then a fine specimen of Utamaro's work.

But some care is necessary. Even during Utamaro's life his work was forged by unscrupulous persons who hoped to reap the benefit of his popularity; and his pupils, under his direction, produced an unknown quantity of work signed with his name. After his death, from about 1808 to 1820, the Second Utamaro worked in the manner of his predecessor, issuing work that cannot with certainty be distinguished from the late work of the master. Besides these perils there is the fact that Utamaro's prints have been well reproduced in recent years; and reproductions are sometimes put forward as originals by ignorant or dishonest dealers. Considerable familiarity with authentic examples of Utamaro's best work, or expert advice, can alone protect the would-be purchaser.