While Mother Sleeps. By Utamaro, named by M. de Goncourt: “Le Fondateur de L’École de la Vie.”
Utamaro planned schemes of colour and devised harmonies—themes which, improvised upon and endlessly imitated by his artist confrères, filled his own countrymen with delight and ravished the hearts of Parisian painters. The influence of Utamaro, Hiroshige and the other masters of Ukiyo-ye revolutionized the colour-sense of the art world, so that Theodore Child, writing in 1892, remarks of the Japanese influence: “The Paris Salon of today as compared with the salon of ten years ago is like a May morning compared with a dark November day.”
The same keen observation and technical skill which would have made Utamaro a famous naturalist is shown in his marvellous studies of women. He was the first Japanese artist who deviated from the traditional manner of treating the face. The academic style demanded the nose to be suggested by one calligraphic, aquiline stroke, the eyes to be mere slits, the mouth the curled up petal of a flower. Utamaro blent with this convention, so little human, a mutinous grace, a spiritual comprehension; he kept the consecrated lines, but made them approach the human. These “effigies of women” became individuals; in one word, he is an idealist, he “makes a goddess out of a courtesan.” No detail of her anatomy escapes his eye, no grace of line or beauty of contour. M. de Goncourt, in detailing the great prints of Utamaro, transports us to the Orient. He unrolls the film of memory, so that again the Japanese woman stands, reclines, and lives before us.
“Vous avez la Japonaise en tous les mouvements intimes de son corps; vous l’avez, dans ses appuiements de tête, sur le dos de sa main, quand elle réfléchit, dans ses agenouillements, les paumes de ses mains appuyées sur les cuisses, quand elle écoute, dans sa parole, jetée de côté, la tête un peu tournée, et qui la montre dans les aspects si joliment fuyants d’un profil perdu; vous l’avez dans sa contemplation amoureuse des fleurs qu’elle regarde aplatie à terre; vous l’avez dans ses renversements où légèrement elle pose, à demi assise, sur la balustrade d’un balcon; vous l’avez dans ses lectures, où elle lit dans le volume, tout près de ses yeux, les deux coudes appuyés sur ses genoux; vous l’avez dans sa toilette qu’elle fait avec une main tenant devant elle, son petit miroir de métal, tandis que de l’autre main passée derrière elle, elle se caresse distraitement la nuque de son écran; vous l’avez dans le contournement de sa main autour d’une coupe de saké, dans l’attouchement délicat et recroquevillé de ses doigts de singe, autour des laques, des porcelaines, des petits objets artistiques de son pays; vous l’avez enfin, la femme de l’Empire-du-Lever-du-Soleil, en sa grâce languide, et son coquet rampement sur les nattes du parquet.”
To translate is to travesty, for the French language seems to be the only medium through which can be filtered the nuances of Japanese thought, which elude the ordinary elements of language, like the perfume of flowers, the bouquet of delicate vintages. Our blunt Anglo-Saxon mars that picture language, where one flexible, curved calligraphic stroke conveys to the æsthetically receptive oriental imagination what stanzas of rhyming rhapsody fail to define. Sir Edwin Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn approach the French, are, so to speak, orientalized. Ordinary English fails to give a Japanese equivalent. It is too emphatic, too objective; it suggests the dominant British hobnail upon the delicate Tea-house tatami—that immaculate, beautiful matting, into whose uniform lines embroidered draperies dissolve deliciously. Oh, those dreams of dresses!—the warp and woof of the visions of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, of Harunobu and Kiyonaga, Toyokuni and Kunisada, and all the rest, the idols of Parisian colourists!
“For us,” says M. de Goncourt, “Utamaro painted violet dresses, where, upon the border, degradation rosée” (fading into Beni, that mystic tint, the spirit of ashes of rose), “birds are swooping,—violet dresses, across which woven in light, zigzag insect characters, composing the Japanese alphabet,—violet dresses, where Corean lions, grim and ferocious, crouch, gleaming in shading of old bronze within the purple folds! Dresses of mauve, smoky, shading into bistre, where the purple iris unsheathes its head from the slender gray-green stalk!” Mourasiki-ya (maison mauve) was the name of the atelier of Utamaro. “Robes of that milky blue the Chinese call ‘blue of the sky after the rain,’ beneath clusters of pale rose peonies; dresses of silvery gray, fretted with sprays of flowering shrubs, making a misty moonshine; pea-green dresses, enamelled with rosy cherry blooms; green dresses, fading into watery tints, hidden by groups of the pawlonia, the coat of arms of the reigning family; purple costumes, channelled with water courses, where mandarin ducks pursue each other around the hem. Oh, the beautiful black backgrounds, controlling the scintillating mass of colour! Black robes sown with chrysanthemums, or showered with pine-needles, worked in white. Black dresses, where finely woven baskets are mingled with sceptres of office! ‘Oh! les belles robes!’ he cries, where flights of cranes dissolve into the distance, where birds are fluttering, where lacy fretwork of fans and little garlands are interwoven!—a motive delighted in by Utamaro as a framework for beloved faces.” All that is beautiful in nature and art lived and breathed in these dresses, upon which the loving hand of the painter left a grace in every fold.
The early inspirer of Utamaro’s genius was Kiyonaga, who had restored the glory of the school of Torii—the printer’s branch of Ukiyo-ye, which had sunk into temporary oblivion under the waning powers of Kiyomitsu. The atelier of Kiyonaga became the sanctuary of the artists of Ukiyo-ye, who, upon entering, forsook their individual traditions. There worshipped Toyokuni of Utagawa; Yeishi, the scion of classic and aristocratic Kano; and at the master’s feet sat the Young Utamaro, absorbing his methods until, in his early compositions, said M. de Goncourt, the technique and mannerisms of Kiyonaga “saute aux yeux.”
The influence of Kiyonaga pervades his most beautiful work; but later, under a life of constant self-indulgence, amongst associations all tending to demoralization, his genius suffered an eclipse. His loss of self-control affected his art, until the sweeping lines and noble contours which his brush had acquired in the atelier of Kiyonaga were lost or widely travestied into a “delirium of female tallness.” In these wild flights his brother artists followed in headlong pursuit, and the contagion of the movement swept the studios of Paris. In the modern poster we see the degenerate offspring of the genius of Utamaro, and of Toyokuni. Professor Fenollosa said, “The generation of Aubrey Beardsley prefer these tricks to the sober grace of Harunobu, Kiyonaga and Koriusai.” It is art born of excess, a “Zolaism in prints.”
The horrors of diseased imagination, the visions begotten of absinthe, which blot the brilliant pages of De Maupassant and the verse of Paul Verlaine, were reflected by Utamaro in his studies of the loathsome and the abnormal, where Montaigne declares, “L’esprit faisant le cheval eschappé, enfante des chimères.” The blasphemous impieties of this culte, deplored by all true Frenchmen, in the country of Hugo and Molière, were distanced by Utamaro, who suborned his art, his cynical brush caricaturing under the distorted figures of noted courtesans the saints and sages of the sacred Buddhist legends. Trading upon his vast popularity, he issued a pictorial satire upon one of the famous Shoguns, but this act of lèse-majesté brought him into disfavour with the reigning Shogun, the Louis XV of Japan, an artistic voluptuary, like his prototype, the subject of Utamaro’s cartoon, and the artist was condemned and cast into prison. From his cell the gay butterfly of the Yoshiwara emerged, spent and enfeebled, daring no more flights of fancy, and dying in 1806, before he reached his fiftieth year, from the effects of his confinement and the misuse of pleasure.