TOYOHIRO: A DAIMYO'S KITE-PARTY.
Triptych. Each sheet size 15 × 10. Signed Toyohiro ga.
Plate 48.
In a landscape of green hills, where a circle of low slopes encloses a space of level ground, stands, on the rising edge of that natural amphitheatre, a group of noble ladies and children in the soft brightness of festal attire—richly decorated pink, black, white, translucent heliotrope. Below and behind them boys are manœuvring a kite, and older men direct briskly. The ladies for whom this simple and charming pastime is arranged do not seem wholly intent upon it. Their tall slender figures move as if in abstraction, an isolated group in the foreground. One grey cherry-tree, with gnarled branches etched against a clear sky, stands in their midst, bare except for the pink of earliest blossoms; and the pale green of the more distant encircling hills is here and there touched with the same luminous flowers.
Across this landscape the slender figures move in slow procession. Their robes sway about them slowly. These sweeping draperies, which Harunobu would have charged with peace and solemnity, are here touched with the tension of more unquiet curves, restless, troubled with some element of torture in their beauty. These are the lines of the branch and of the wave, bent by the strain of hidden and conflicting forces. The clear festive brightness of pink cherry-blossoms with the light of spring shining through them serves but to accentuate the faint melancholy of the trailing figures on whom lies a wistfulness that no spring can satisfy. They linger, exquisitely aimless; beautiful, and weary for a yet-unattained beauty; happy, but grave with the shadow of fleeting happiness; sad, though reconciled by the knowledge that beauty is half sadness. They have walked with expectant steps to the edge of the world; and now they pace, delicately wondering, not far from the abyss where there is nothing. Autumn will always be to them cold and unkindred; yet in the flush of the spring their thoughts will turn toward death and autumn. One cannot imagine them wholly joyous. They seem haunted by a nostalgia for remote delights, unearthly music, secret and dimly remembered gardens. Strange, late, exotic flowers are these, whom a pensiveness not known to simpler and sturdier natures disturbs with futile dreams.
A similar feeling is so often repeated in Toyohiro's work that I venture to regard it as the keynote of his genius.
Toyohiro's landscapes are without notable beauty. He had a habit of cutting across the middle of his picture with wide streaks of white mist—an unpleasant device adopted to produce the effect of distance. He is, however, an historical link of great importance between his master, Toyoharu, and his pupil, Hiroshige, the greatest of all landscape painters. As a conduit of landscape painting at a time when the Ukioye School was little given to this as a separate study, Toyohiro's work in this field may well engage our attention; but one suspects that it is the fame of his great pupil's landscapes rather than the intrinsic merit of his own that has given his their prominence.
Toyohiro produced a few pillar-prints of birds which have great distinction; an almost classic feeling marks some of them.
Toyohiro's prints are not numerous; Toyokuni's outnumber his twenty to one. His pillar-prints are very rare; his triptychs are generally notable. It is necessary to add, however, that poor impressions of his work, printed in poor colours, are more common than any other kind.
VII
THE FIFTH PERIOD:
THE DOWNFALL
FROM THE
DEATH OF UTAMARO
TO THE
DEATH OF HIROSHIGE
(1806-1858)