Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

HARUNOBU: GIRL VIEWING MOON AND BLOSSOMS.
Size 11 × 8. Signed Harunobu ga. Chandler Collection.

Plate 13.

From this time on, during six years, Harunobu produced a series of prints whose grace is unsurpassable. The firm and refined strokes of his brush endowed with a fresh charm all that was lovely in the flowing draperies and serene faces of the young girls of Japan. He was the painter of youth. The type which he introduced was the slender and gracious embodiment of youthful girlhood. And an indescribable delicacy and purity of manner clothes as with clear light these girl-figures of his. His draperies, as in [Plate 11], are never drawn naturalistically, but always with a certain conventionalization that produces folds and swirls more abstractly beautiful than a literal rendering. He for the first time in colour-printing made a practice of giving to his figures a background that exhibited fully the scene of their daily lives. Instead of the heroic figures of the Primitives, stalking through space in colossal grandeur, he drew the familiar forms of everyday existence nestling among their natural surroundings. The world he pictures is, however, one of mortals who hardly know the burdens of mortality. Like the women of Botticelli, they seem to poise in an atmosphere of more rarefied loveliness than anything we know in reality. Rich as may have been the beauty of the tea-house girl, O-Sen, whom Harunobu loved and painted, and of the little seller of cosmetics, O-Fuji, who appears many times in his pictures, they were but the starting-point, the exciting agency, from which Harunobu passed on into a secret fanciful world of his own to evoke his dream-maidens. Half of the charm of these figures, such as the one in [Plate 12], lies in this unreal and unhuman impression they make; they are not Japanese women or any women, but living fairy-tales, butterfly creatures out of nowhere. All that is joyous and playful in the Japanese spirit lifts them on wings of fantasy into regions of universal delight. They are the most fragrant flowers of Japanese art.

It follows that Harunobu's subjects are almost always light and trivial scenes—a girl playing with a cat, a young man and a maiden walking amiably together, young girls engaged in some delicate occupation, or, as in [Plate 13], pausing in pensive reverie. A gentle joy pervades most of them, or at least a gravity so light that it is nearer joy than melancholy. Harunobu does not handle these scenes with any especial insight into life; they are not windows through which we may look and see the human souls of the people he portrays. They are nothing more than gay, pleasing moments—records of fortunate hours—froth and foam over the real deeps of life.

HARUNOBU: COURTESAN DETAINING A PASSING SAMURAI.
Size 11 × 8. Signed Harunobu ga.

Plate 14.

Yet as the spectator allows the pure and delicate atmosphere of one of these creations to enter his spirit, he gradually becomes aware that not this trivial scene, not this light episode, was Harunobu's real theme; his real theme was the great harmonics of colour and line. Out of colour and line his immeasurable genius evoked lofty improvisations. He dedicated the fervour of his passion and his vision to the creation of these orchestrations of tone, these modulated arabesques of contour. Beyond his cheerful groups, beyond his felicitous arrangements, lies the history of his prodigious essay to impose his sense of beauty upon one section of chaos. Kurth is quite right when he calls him "the great virtuoso of colour."

Most of Harunobu's prints are of small size, almost square. In this form his refinement found its most perfect expression. If we would see an aspect of Harunobu that is of more impressive proportions, and realize that scope as well as daintiness was in him, we must turn to certain rare pillar-prints which were done chiefly in the years immediately preceding his untimely death. Here dignity combines with grace, and an exalted sweep of composition adds nobility to that exquisite colour which here no less than in his small prints finds place. Two of these pillar-prints, reproduced in [Plate 15], may serve to illustrate this last phase of Harunobu's greatest triumph.