The colour which Sharaku employs is of a unique quality: sombre, with lurid lights; heavy and opaque; nightmare colours, leashed into miraculous and incredible harmony; things of infernal and dusky splendour; "tragic colours," Kurth calls them. The dark mica backgrounds, which Sharaku is said, without much proof, to have invented, heighten to a remarkable degree his colour effects. Words and reproductions are alike powerless to convey any sense of them; they hold in store an impressive sensation for him who has not yet seen them. With them Sharaku takes first rank as a colourist.
Toward the end of his brief career, his portraits became almost too terrible in their savage and tragic irony. In the large double-portraits Sharaku tears the mask of humanity aside and shows the very beast. Yet to call even these most extreme of his productions caricatures is to obscure a subtle spiritual essence by a crude word. They are exactly as comic as the ravings of Lear, as mirth-provoking as the laments of Shylock. They are not the light mocking of a scoffer or a comedian, but the appalling and tortured sneer of a man whose vision of men is coloured by his desire for the gods.
"Because he did not represent reality, but on the contrary painted unnatural figures, the public became hostile toward him." ... "His figures were too realistic." ... "He was a bungler in art." ... From these conflicting criticisms, found in various Japanese authorities, we may gather with what comprehension the public of that day accepted the final work of the great painter; and we may conjecture what neglect and hatred forced him into a never-broken retirement.
Dr. Kurth is of the opinion that, after the year 1795, Sharaku still continued to produce secretly a few prints under the assumed name of Kabukidō Yenkyō, and attempted under this disguise to win back the popularity of his prime. This is an alluring but somewhat fantastic theory, which neither the documentary nor the internal evidence of Yenkyō's work adequately supports. Other authorities believe Yenkyō to have been an independent artist who was a pupil of Sharaku. His work strangely resembles that of Kunimasa I. At the present time it cannot be said that the question is wholly settled; but it would be rash to accept Kurth's theory at its face value.
In conclusion, let us grant that Sharaku is not for every one. One cannot quarrel with a person who says, "I understand Sharaku; I see the measureless depths of his tragic irony, the unique splendour of his colour, the perfect mastery of his composition. But I do not like him. I prefer Kiyonaga, just as I prefer the stately beauty of Keats to the troubled profundity of Blake." Such a position is comprehensible and impregnable. But he who finds Sharaku merely grotesque or absurd or repellent should return to the portraits for further study; he has not yet reached the immortal heart of Sharaku's work, and he is missing a memorable experience.
Exact comparisons are profitless; but most students of Japanese prints have at certain times turned from the work of Sharaku with the deep conviction that this man was the greatest genius of them all.
Sharaku's output was not large, and his work is now of the utmost rarity. The Parisian collectors long ago recognized Sharaku's greatness, and at a time when Fenollosa was proclaiming Sharaku as an "arch-purveyor of vulgarities," and Strange was grudgingly describing him in seven lines as an artist "of great power but little grace," the collectors of Paris had already acquired such Sharaku treasures as are now a lavish and deserved reward for their foresight. Perhaps the only collection of Sharaku prints that can rival those of Paris is the notable Spaulding Collection of Boston, which takes high rank.
Choki.
A Silver Print.
The sky, a plate of darkened steel,
Weighs on the far rim of the sea,
Save where the lifted glooms reveal
The last edge of the sun burned free.
Blood-red, it drops departingly.