Possibly Kitao Masanobu is most widely known for his elaborate illustrated book, "Celebrated Women of the Tea Houses and their Handwritings." This volume was published about 1780; I have already referred to it in dealing with the great illustrated book of Shunsho and Shigemasa. It consists of seven large double-page illustrations in many colours, and is a highly praised work, sheets of which are often mounted as separate prints. It appears to me, however, to have been overrated; and my impression is that in these designs elaborateness has smothered composition and richness has obliterated beauty.
Kitao Masanobu's single-sheet prints are lamentably few, as are also his pillar-prints; but from those that remain to us it is possible to rank Masanobu as an artist second to only the very greatest. Spirituality is a clumsy word to use in describing work so definitely embodied as this; yet none other conveys the sense of his peculiar and grave harmony. The mature beauty of his work carries us back to the perfection of Shigemasa.
The collector will search long before he finds an important print by this artist to add to his collection.
Masayoshi.
Kitao Masayoshi, who frequently signed himself Keisai or Shosin, was a curious and original designer, who lived from 1761 to 1824. Though a pupil of Shigemasa, he appears to have drawn a large part of his inspiration from a source outside the Ukioye movement—the Kano School of painting, in which the classical traditions still flourished. In his main period, contemporaneous with Kiyonaga, his work was little influenced by the great master. His designs are marked chiefly by the vividness of his observation of flowers, animals, and landscape, and by his technical skill in recording them. His books of sketches are his best-known works—drawings in a manner new to wood-engraving; he seldom employs any key-block, but leaves the main body of his colour in broad impressionistic sweeps of the brush without definite boundary. He approached Nature somewhat as did Hokusai in later days, with a sharp perception and infinite interest. His work lies aside from the main current of Ukioye history—an interesting backwater that comes more properly within the region of classical painting than within that of prints.
KITAO MASANOBU: THE CUCKOO.
Size 15½ × 22. Signed Masanobu ga. Spaulding Collection.
Plate 34.
Single-sheet prints by Masayoshi are very rare. His book-sheets are somewhat more frequently met with.