HARUNOBU: LADY TALKING WITH FAN-VENDOR.
Polychrome. Size 11 × 7½. Signed Harunobu ga. Chandler Collection.
Plate 12.
The old three-colour prints had achieved fine effects by means of powerfully conceived but essentially simple mosaics of colour. Now Harunobu turned the three-stringed lute into the violin, capable of expressing the most delicate modulations of tone. Beginning with combinations of only four or five colours, he gradually increased the number of blocks used. It is certain that he used eight blocks on at least one 1765 calendar print. In the end he had at his command a palette which, by the use of no less than twelve or fifteen blocks, and with the limitless number of shades obtainable by superimposing one colour upon another, made the whole rainbow his. Constant experiment marked his further progress. We have, for example, one print which he originally printed from eight blocks, and later varied by increasing the blocks to ten, and still later to thirteen. From year to year an ever fresh succession of complex colour-harmonies emanated from his fertile brain.
Until the invention of polychrome printing, Harunobu had not adequately expressed himself; now, having found his true instrument, he played divinely. The year 1765 was a Jubilee year, celebrating the nine-hundredth anniversary of the entrance of Sugawara Michigane, the great statesman, painter, and humanist, to the Court of the Emperor. This circumstance, in connection with the desire of literary men to present to their friends specimens of the new prints as New Year cards, led Harunobu to produce a number of dated calendar-prints of this year—a fortunate occurrence which has been of great aid to students of his work. The theory that these dated prints are the expression of Harunobu's naïve exultation over the new discovery is now generally discredited. Since the calendars are dated 1765, Mr. Gookin's suggestion that they were probably made in the last months of 1764 seems reasonable; and this date must therefore be regarded as marking the beginning of polychrome printing.
The brilliant new prints fittingly ushered in the festal year. And the public was not too busy with its celebrations to take note of the change. The new manner with its wealth of colour-beauty won instant popularity; and under the name of "Brocade Pictures of the Eastern Capital" grew to such fame that by 1767 prints in the old style were almost driven out of the market, and Harunobu was unquestioned lord of Ukioye.
It is not strange that in the glow of success and ambition he should have put behind him his old actor-pictures. "I am a Japanese painter," he wrote proudly; "why should I paint the portraits of this vulgar herd?" And at this moment feeling himself akin to the great classical tradition whose refined beauties had been handed down from ancient China mingled with the beauties of poets and sages, he determined that he would lift from the Ukioye School the stigma of vulgarity which the theatre had given it, and invest it with some of that gentle cultivation which fills like light the old Chinese paintings of Ming gardens. Therefore he turned his energies to the depiction of another world than the theatre—the life of aristocratic ladies, of young lovers, of those famed beauties who in humbler station were the flowers and sunshine of the tea-house and the festival. [Plate 14] portrays one of these. His method of handling the figures—a peculiar mingling of naïveté and sophistication, like that of a minstrel singing incredible enchanted legends with complete seriousness—was a new and never-recovered note in the history of Ukioye.
