Amano Toyonaga, Ishikawa Toyomasu, and Ishikawa Toyokuma were probably pupils of Toyonobu.
IV
THE SECOND
PERIOD:
THE EARLY
POLYCHROME
MASTERS
FROM THE INVENTION
OF POLYCHROME PRINTING
TO THE RETIREMENT
OF SHUNSHO
(1764-80)
CHAPTER IV
THE SECOND PERIOD: THE EARLY POLYCHROME MASTERS
From the Invention of Polychrome Printing to the Retirement of Shunsho (1764-80)
The transition from primitive to sophisticated art is very like the progression of a race from its heroic youth to its elaborately gifted maturity. Life grows more complex, the material riches and the machinery of living become more diversified; but it is still to the early days that one looks for the strongest development of personality and the most daring achievement in the face of great difficulties. Sophistication, in the history of an art as of a race, brings refinements and nuances unknown to the pioneers; but it cannot intensify and may often encumber the spiritual force and essential genius of the creators. The great individuals of the earlier time developed all that was essential as far as it could be developed; the later enlargement of scope is in the direction of the material and the accidental. In the Primitives we find the full stature of the spirit; in the art of later days, with all its parade of processes, we shall hardly find more.
In the First Period the initial impulse of print-designing manifested itself in work that was powerful and beautiful, but of simple technique. In the Second Period the barriers that confined the Primitives were swept away by new possibilities of expression. The three-colour prints gave place to prints in which an unlimited number of blocks could be employed; and this enlargement of the artist's resources produced a new and splendid blossoming. In this Second Period the art seemed to hesitate midway between the forces of the primitive inspiration, which was one of pure and stately decoration, and the more naturalistic forces that were making ready for the Third Period, with its fuller rendering of the lights and spaces of life. The presence of both groups of forces makes this Second Period possibly the most interesting of all.
The specific characteristics of the period are sharply marked. They consist, first of all, in technical advances—the mastery of full-colour printing and the realization through this process of the marvellous colour-dreams of the great masters. But beyond the technical advances there is a change in spiritual attitude; the artist, heretofore content to create a pure decoration, a masterful mosaic that expressed his æsthetic ideals, now begins to adopt a more personal attitude in his treatment of the forces and spectacles of daily existence. True, he disposes these elements arbitrarily; the picture he creates is a world of imagination; but as compared with the Primitives, he tells us more of his experience and is closer to our own. Even his most fanciful designs bring to us some remote and abstract echo of known voices. Lyric joy speaks through Harunobu, dramatic terror through Shunsho, splendour through Koriusai, mystery through Buncho; and though the medium be a symbol, and its connection with reality as remote as that of music, yet by the vividness of the emotion evoked in us we may judge of the definiteness of the artist's motive, and realize through colour and line an intangible human voice.