An illustration from “The Occupations of Women.” By Suzuki Harunobu, who, though a worker in prints, styled himself “Yamato Yeshi,” the title assigned to the great court painters.
He realized that book prints rather than actor prints ought to be the most potent force of Ukiyo-ye.
Shigenaga followed in the footsteps of Masanobu, but his fame is eclipsed by that of his great pupil Harunobu, whose genius was displayed not only by the introduction of new colours upon the printing-block, but by his schemes of arrangement, juxtaposition of shades, and marvellous handling of the areas between the printed outlines. This restriction of measured spaces does not cramp the painter’s individuality and sweep of brush; rather, they set him free to concentrate his genius upon blended harmonies, and interwoven schemes of colour, and to surrender himself to the intoxication of the palette.
Suzuki Harunobu revolutionized the status of the Popular School, pronouncing this dictum, “Though I am a worker in prints I shall hereafter style myself ‘Yamato Yeishi,’” the title assumed by the ancient court painters. A national painter he declared himself, let him deny who dare, working through the new medium of the despised and ostracized Ukiyo-ye print from which he determined to remove the stigma of vulgarity.
Now we see a strange transposition in the aims of the popular artists. Harunobu, though a pupil of Shigenaga, the printer, took for his models the subjects of the painter Shunsui, successor to Miyagawa Choshun, and by rejecting stage motives discarded the Torii tradition. From Shunsui, Harunobu borrowed the ineffable grace and refinement which breathe from the forms of his women, from the painter he stole colour harmonies and designs with landscape backgrounds, which the Torii School had hitherto ignored. The introduction of genre painting, though attributed by Walter Pater to Giorgione, applies equally to the work of Harunobu and his follower Koriusai. “He is the inventor of genre, of those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion nor of allegorical or historical teaching: little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape, morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, refined upon and idealized till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. People may move those spaces of cunningly blent colour readily and take them with them where they go, like a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be used at will as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence into one’s cabinet, and like persons live with us for a day or a lifetime.” Must not such an influence have descended upon Whistler when, saturated with the atmosphere of Hiroshige, he imagined that most beautiful of his “Nocturnes” described by Theodore Child as “a vision in form and colour, in luminous air, a Japanese fancy realized on the banks of the gray Thames”?
The School of Torii.
The Printers’ Branch of Ukiyo-ye.
HE Torii School was pre-eminently the exponent of the drama. It was bound up with stage development and ministered to the emotional temperament of the nation; leading in what may be considered a national obsession, a mania for actors and actor-prints.
A fascinating subject is this century of dramatic evolution fostered by the printers’ branch of the Popular School. The actor had been consigned, in dark feudal days, to the lowest rung in the ladder of caste, ranking next to the outcast (Eta), as in early English days the strolling player was associated with tinkers and the other vagrant population.