The beautiful inhabitants of these celebrated houses of the Yoshiwara (the flower quarter) of Yedo had ever been sought as models by the artists of Ukiyo-ye. But, alas! the sensuous poetic-artistic temperament of Utamaro, undisciplined and uncontrolled, led to his undoing. The pleasure-loving artist, recognizing no creed but the worship of beauty, refusing to be bound by any fetters but those of fancy, fell at last into the lowest depths of degradation, physical and moral. And this debasement of their leader, tainting his art, was reflected in the work of his brother artists and hastened the decadence of the Popular School.
To understand the influences which sapped the self-control of the gay and beauty-loving Utamaro, we have only to glance at the text by Jipensha Ikkou of “The Annuary of the Green Houses,” two volumes of prints in colour, so marvellously beautiful that they caused the artist to be recognized as, in a sense, the official painter of the Yoshiwara. The writer thus sums up the fatal fascination of the inmates, the courtesans of highest rank, who alone were depicted by Utamaro. “The daughters of the Yoshiwara are brought up like princesses. From infancy they are given the most finished education” (from the Japanese standpoint, be it observed). “They are taught reading, writing, art, music, le thé, le parfum” (in the game of scents, the art is to guess by inhaling the odour of burning perfumes the secret of their composition). “Their entourage is that of princesses, brought up in the seclusion of the palace. Coming from all parts of the ‘Land of the Rising Sun,’ they must discard their individual patois and learn to speak the archaic tongue, slightly modified, the poetical, the noble language of the court from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.”
In the home of the celebrated Tsutaya Juzabro, who edited the most beautiful books of the time, in his early impressionable youth lived Utamaro, within a stone’s throw of the great gate leading to the Yoshiwara. By day he devoted himself to his art, by night he surrendered himself to the fatal enchantment of that brilliant “Underworld,” until, like Merlin, ensnared by Vivian, with the charm of “woven paces and waving hands,” his art sapped by excesses, he became “lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.”
Let us, forgetting this sad sequel, glance at the works which testify to the life of high artistic endeavour led by Utamaro in the early part of his career. In the preface to the “Yehon Moushi Yerabi” (Chosen Insects), the master of Utamaro, Toriyama Sekiyen, throws so charming a sidelight upon the youth of the artist, that the temptation to quote is irresistible. The value of these Japanese prefaces to the world, to workers in every field, is incalculable. At the outset of his work, M. de Goncourt alludes to the well-known preface of Hokusai in the “Fugaku Hiak’kei,” and doubtless fortified himself by the stimulating example of the old master, when undertaking at the age of seventy the great task of presenting to the Western world, under the title of “L’Art Japonais,” a history of five noted painters, besides that of other artists in bronze and lacquer, pottery and iron—artists in a land where the terms artist and artisan are interchangeable, the only country where art industrial almost always touches grand art.
The translator of the preface of Sekiyen is gratefully referred to by M. de Goncourt as “l’intelligent, le savant, l’aimable M. Hyashi.” It may be considered a revolutionary manifesto of the Profane School, the school of real life, in opposition to the hierarchical Buddhist academies of Kano and Tosa, which had become stultified by tradition and stifled by conventional observances.
“Préface écrite par Toriyama Sekiyen, le maître d’Outamaro, célébrant le naturisme (sorti du cœur) de son petit, de son cher élève Outa.” “Reproduire la vie par le cœur, et en dessiner la structure au pinceau, est la loi de la peinture. L’étude que vient de publier maintenant, mon élève Outamaro, reproduit la vie même du monde des insectes. C’est la vraie peinture du cœur. Et quand je me souviens d’autrefois, je me rappelle que dès l’enfance, le petit Outa, observait le plus infini détail des choses. Ainsi à l’automne, quand il était dans le jardin, il se mettait en chasse des insectes, et que ce soit un criquet où une sauterelle, avait-il fait une prise, il gardait la bestiole dans sa main et s’amusait à l’étudier. Et combien de fois je l’ai grondé dans l’appréhension qu’il ne prenne l’habitude, de donner la mort à des êtres vivants. Maintenant qu’il a acquis son grand talent du pinceau, il fait de ces études d’insectes, la gloire de sa profession.”
The enthusiastic master of le petit Outa proceeds to rhapsodize upon his pupil’s genius and intimate knowledge of the structure of insects. “He makes us hear,” he says, “the shrilling of the tamamoushi,” the cicada of Japan, whose endless peevish twanging upon one string forms an underlying accompaniment to the harmonies of long summer days. “He borrows the light weapons of the grasshopper for making war; he exhibits the dexterity of the earthworm, boring the soil under the foundations of old buildings; he penetrates the mysteries of nature in the groping of the larvæ, in the lighting of his path by the glow-worm, and he ends by disentangling the end of the thread of the spider’s web.”
The colour-printing of these insects is a miracle of art, says M. de Goncourt, and there is nothing comparable to it in Europe. Of the methods by which these colour prints are brought to such a height of perfection, it is almost impossible to speak authoritatively. They are the result of a threefold combination: of a paper marvellously prepared from the bark of the shrub, Kozo, diluted with the milk of rice flour and a gummy decoction extracted from the roots of the hydrangea and hibiscus; of dyes, into the secret of whose alchemy no modern artist can penetrate, it being safe to say the early “Tan-ye” and “Beni-ye” prints can never be reproduced; of the application of those colours by the master engraver’s fingers—that wizard hand of the Orient into whose finger-tips are distilled the mysteries of bygone centuries. A portion of the colour by means of this calculated pressure is drunk, absorbed into the paper, and only the transparency is left vibrating upon the fibres, like colour beneath the glaze.
The “Catalogue Raisonné” of M. de Goncourt is a prose masterpiece. His descriptive touches, like pastels set in jewels, captivate the imagination. Through him we see the albums, the fans, the kakemonos, the surimonos. Oh, the prints, with their wondrous backgrounds, the delight of Utamaro! Sometimes straw-yellow, the uniformity broken with clouds of ground mica; sometimes gray in tint, like the traces of receding waves upon the beach. Some silvered backgrounds throw moonlight reflections upon the figures; some are sombre, bizarre—all are marvellous beyond words. And the colours! we cannot define them in English. The “bleus” (malades des mauves), the “rose” (beni) “si peu de rose, qu’ils semblent s’apercevoir à travers un tulle; l’azur—délavé, et comme noyé dans l’eau,”—not colours, but nuances, which recall the colours. And the “Gauffrage,” so effective with the print artists, with us a mere confectioner’s touch!
It is said that “the æsthetic temperament of a nation is most subtly felt in the use of colour. Purity, coldness, sensuality, brightness, dullness of tints, are significant terms correlated to mental and physical human phenomena.” The assertion of Ruskin, that “the bodily system is in a healthy state when we can see hues clearly in their most delicate tints, and enjoy them, fully and simply, with the kind of enjoyment children have in eating sweet things,” is brought to mind in viewing the Japanese people upon the occasion of one of their great flower fêtes, feasting their eyes upon cherry blooms or trailing clusters of the wistaria.