Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Kincho Sekiga is said to have been a pupil of Buncho.

Shunko II was a pupil of Shunyei. His name is written in different characters from that of the first Shunko. Kichosai Shunko also produced actor-prints.

Yumisho was a very rare pupil who adopted Kiyonaga's style in line-work. The same may be said of Yenshi, some of whose work is very beautiful; he appears to have come much under the influence of Yeishi. Several of his triptychs are fine.

Toyoharu.

Utagawa Toyoharu is a strangely equivocal figure in print history; his fame is great, but no surviving print of his, so far as I have been able to ascertain, is of a quality to justify fully his reputation. Born in 1733, he studied with Shigenaga and probably with Toyonobu, produced a limited number of prints in the sixties and seventies, withdrew from prints to painting when Kiyonaga's new style grew to splendour, and died in 1814. He is said to have been a sensitive and delicately strung individual who shrank from competition and worked obscurely. His best-known work is a series of twelve designs for the various months done in collaboration with Shunsho and Shigemasa; each print is divided diagonally into two scenes—a device of unfortunate and ingenious ugliness. The figures, however, have a certain delicate grace. His pillar-prints, which are rare, have considerable beauty.

UTAGAWA TOYOHARU.

Toyoharu has been called a greater artist than Shunsho. It may be true, yet I am inclined to regard this view either as the result of his painting and not his print-designing, or as part of a great Toyoharu myth, for which the later success of his pupils is responsible. Certain it is that of his surviving prints few are noteworthy, and that he was greater as a painter and teacher than as a print-designer. We shall remember him more as the instructor of Toyokuni and Toyohiro and as the precursor of Hiroshige than for any of his own prints that remain to us.

As a figure-painter, he is known as the founder of the Utagawa School. As a landscape-painter, he made successful use of European perspective, which he probably learned from Dutch engravings, and was perhaps the first Ukioye print-artist to return to the habit of the older schools and treat landscape not as a mere setting but as a thing by itself. His scenes are too stiff and too crowded with petty details to lay any real claim to beauty. He used as the dominant note in many of them the orange colour so dear to Koriusai; but no pigment can well be imagined that is less fitted for landscape-rendering. Yet the historical importance of these prints is great; for they are, so to speak, the grandparents of the marvellous landscapes of Hiroshige.

Utagawa Toyonobu is believed by some authorities to have been merely Toyoharu's early name; others think him identical with Ishikawa Toyonobu; and still others regard him as an independent artist who was a pupil of Ishikawa Toyonobu, his greater namesake. The few prints we have by him—I know of less than half a dozen—are not sufficient to enable one to form an opinion as to this.