Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

Plate 36.

He produced a considerable number of notable full-size sheets depicting single figures of women seated or kneeling, engaged in gracious occupations such as flower-arrangement. Some of these are without background; others have backgrounds of pale grey wash; while still others, perhaps the finest of all, stand out against luminous yellow grounds. One of these appears in [Plate 36]. In these prints is displayed Yeishi's power to draw exquisitely the long sweeping curves of draperies; and the strangely pensive, hieratic quality of his faces is at its best. Their charm lies not in the brushwork, which is never as free and bold as Kiyonaga's, but in the sentiment of remote beauty of which these haunting curves are such pure symbols. He also produced a number of groups of courtesans on parade, with little or no background, after the fashion inaugurated by Koriusai and Kiyonaga. These appear stiff beside Kiyonaga's; but they have nevertheless great charm of line and colour. His album of the Thirty-six Poetesses, about 1800, is a series of fantastic and gorgeous colour-dreams. His series of standing women against chocolate or silver backgrounds rises in colour to the level of Sharaku.

Yeishi could not, however, escape the influence of the growing decadence. The public taste at the end of the eighteenth century was debased by a craving for gaudy eccentricities. Utamaro led in the rush to gratify this craving; and even the aristocratic Yeishi was unable to resist the general decline. Therefore toward the end of his career as a print-designer his work greatly altered. His figures grew very tall and willowy; their necks became so exaggeratedly thin that they seem unable to support the great pile of the coiffure; an attenuated snakyness distinguishes their lines; and the curves of their garments are distorted into the most fantastic folds and swirls. It was in this period that Yeishi produced most of his large bust-portraits on yellow or mica grounds; in these he followed the lead of Utamaro, who had influenced him considerably during his whole career. The noble and grave faces of his earlier days became wooden and distorted; and when Yeishi at last stopped print-designing and returned to the life of society and painting from which he had been so long a renegade, the loss was not a great one; for the degradation of the age's taste had engulfed him—as, indeed, it did all his contemporaries.

Yeishi's ordinary work is not particularly rare. Even his slightest prints have so much charm that they may be highly recommended to the attention of the modest collector. Yeishi's important works are of great scarcity. His figures on yellow or mica ground, his grey prints, his large heads, and his pillar-prints are quite as difficult to obtain as any of the prints of this or the preceding period; his best triptychs are extraordinarily hard to procure.

YEISHI: INTERIOR OPENING ON TO THE SEASHORE.
Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Printed in several tones of grey. Size 15 × 10.
Signed Yeishi ga. Metzgar Collection.

Plate 37.

Yeisho.

Of Yeishi's many pupils, Shokosai Yeisho stands out as the most important. Nothing is known of him except that his work was done toward the end of the eighteenth century.