Chats on Japanese Prints

by Arthur Davison Ficke

To call Sharaku a realist is a silly, untruthful attempt to muffle in words forces that one does not understand. He was hardly more a realist than Kiyonaga. He saw in the spectacle before him certain elements of beauty and terror; he selected and moulded them into his cunningly devised designs; and the result was as much a creation of the visionary mind—a true idealism—as the pictures of the fairy-tale-telling Harunobu. It is no mere realism, but an insidious dissection and a mordant reconstruction, that is so striking in these works. The most savage efforts of modern caricature are child's play beside Sharaku's disintegrating analysis and his satanic reassembling of features. He does to the face and its concealed passions what Michael Angelo's anatomical figure does to the nerves and muscles—revealing appallingly the secrets of structure and the machinery of power.

Yet, in spite of all the distortions and exaggerations and displacements, Sharaku's satyrical faces live. They have an unnatural and monstrous life—like the life of Gothic gargoyles and fabulous animals, whose parts are brought together into an incredible yet organic creation. Looking upon them, one realizes that for Sharaku beauty meant not sweetness or grace, but vitality—the clench and rending of the earthquake forces of life. He sought no harmonies of sentiment like those of Harunobu; he plunged wholly into a maelstrom of powers whose magnificent surge and flow was to him the sole end and the sole consolation.

He drew no courtesans, no scenes from the daily life of the people, no festivals, no tea-house gardens by the river; but with a baleful concentration he, the proud master of the esoteric Nō drama, kept his eyes fixed unswervingly upon the pathetic mimes of the vulgar stage—outcasts, common lumps strutting for an hour of glory in gorgeous robes and heroic rôles before a gaping populace. How one longs for one more work from Sharaku's hands—a portrait of himself, seated in the stalls, watching the play at its height! One can almost imagine the peering eyes, the tight lips, the hidden hands....

So far I have spoken chiefly of the large heads of Sharaku. But it must not be forgotten that he produced a number of designs in hoso-ye form that are the very flower of his work. Kurth places certain of these early in Sharaku's career; he is, perhaps, wrong in this, for many of those which he thus dates give evidence of an art so mature and masterful that they must be at least contemporaneous with the Ronin Series. Such are the print of Arashi Ryūzō as an aged noble in robe of black with violet girdle, and the print of Segawa Kikusabrō in robe of olive and purple holding an open fan. In the finest of these hoso-ye the dramatic force of the composition is so subtle that the element of caricature takes a subordinate place. A lyric mood pervades them. It is impossible to contemplate these figures without a sense, not merely of the irony and contempt which they sometimes embody, but also of the tragic heights on which they move. Lofty conflicts, desperate destinies, immense strainings toward desired goals, immense despairs before impassable barriers—these are some of the emotions that confront us here. The echo of the tragedy of the Greeks is around them; their gestures seem the shadows of titanic cataclysms. Kiyonaga gave us the gods; Sharaku gives us those who fought against the gods. If it were my fortune to choose, out of the tens of thousands of prints that I have seen, one print which could alone be saved from some impending universal destruction, I am not sure whether I would take Harunobu's flawless "Flute Player," or Kiyonaga's serene "Terrace by the Sea," or that terrible print of Sharaku's, illustrated in both Kurth and the catalogue of the exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in which the orange-robed figure of Nakayama Tomisabrō stalks by with an intensity of passion that makes one's flesh creep—a vibrancy of line, colour, and emotion that seems the apogee of beauty and terror.

SHARAKU: THE ACTOR KOSAGAWA TSUNEYO AS A WOMAN IN THE DRAMA OF THE FORTY-SEVEN RONIN.
Silver background. Size 14 × 10. Signed Toshiusai Sharaku ga. Ainsworth Collection.

Plate 44.

The hoso-ye prints have, upon the whole, more poise and serenity than the busts; and they will perhaps be judged—in a hundred years, when the excitement of the discovery of Sharaku is over—to be among his greatest works. When they occur in triptychs, as probably all were originally designed to do, they constitute more harmonious and dramatic units than any of Shunsho's actor-triptychs. The finest, and latest in order of production, are generally those without background; in these, isolated and sublime against an empty universe of yellow tint, rise the supreme evocations of Sharaku's genius.

Great distinction of composition marks all of Sharaku's work. Both the hoso-ye and the large bust-portraits are drawn with classic simplicity of lines and masses. Nothing short of certain of the Primitives can approach them. Every superfluous ornament is omitted; as in [Plate 43], each line is cut down to its meagrest possible limit. But the expressiveness of the drawing is unsurpassable; and the æsthetic effect of the direct composition grows with every repeated sight. These strange heads against the dark glimmering backgrounds seem Titans rooted in the void; they loom upon one's vision enormously; they are overwhelming with the spiritual greatness of their creator. In spite of all the disturbing unquietness of their conflicts, they are charged with a monumental equilibrium of design, sealed with an exalted peace of conception, poised as for eternity with the repose of measureless space and time around them. At first sight, one would imagine these portraits to be impossibly restless things to live with; but greater familiarity proves them to be like the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel—vast and enduring figures, whose large passion does not obliterate the fundamental tranquillity of their conception.