Chapter IV: The Second Period: the Early Polychrome Masters (1)

FROM THE INVENTION OF POLYCHROME PRINTING TO THE RETIREMENT OF
SHUNSHO (1764-80)

The transition from primitive to sophisticated art is very like the progression of a race from its heroic youth to its elaborately gifted maturity. Life grows more complex, the material riches and the machinery of living become more diversified; but it is still to the early days that one looks for the strongest development of personality and the most daring achievement in the face of great difficulties. Sophistication, in the history of an art as of a race, brings refinements and nuances unknown to the pioneers; but it cannot intensify and may often encumber the spiritual force and essential genius of the creators. The great individuals of the earlier time developed all that was essential as far as it could be developed; the later enlargement of scope is in the direction of the material and the accidental. In the Primitives we find the full stature of the spirit; in the art of later days, with all its parade of processes, we shall hardly find more.

In the First Period the initial impulse of print-designing manifested itself in work that was powerful and beautiful, but of simple technique. In the Second Period the barriers that confined the Primitives were swept away by new possibilities of expression. The three-colour prints gave place to prints in which an unlimited number of blocks could be employed; and this enlargement of the artist's resources produced a new and splendid blossoming. In this Second Period the art seemed to hesitate midway between the forces of the primitive inspiration, which was one of pure and stately decoration, and the more naturalistic forces that were making ready for the Third Period, with its fuller rendering of the lights and spaces of life. The presence of both groups of forces makes this Second Period possibly the most interesting of all.

The specific characteristics of the period are sharply marked. They consist, first of all, in technical advances--the mastery of full-colour printing and the realization through this process of the marvellous colour-dreams of the great masters. But beyond the technical advances there is a change in spiritual attitude; the artist, heretofore content to create a pure decoration, a masterful mosaic that expressed his æsthetic ideals, now begins to adopt a more personal attitude in his treatment of the forces and spectacles of daily existence. True, he disposes these elements arbitrarily; the picture he creates is a world of imagination; but as compared with the Primitives, he tells us more of his experience and is closer to our own. Even his most fanciful designs bring to us some remote and abstract echo of known voices. Lyric joy speaks through Harunobu, dramatic terror through Shunsho, splendour through Koriusai, mystery through Buncho; and though the medium be a symbol, and its connection with reality as remote as that of music, yet by the vividness of the emotion evoked in us we may judge of the definiteness of the artist's motive, and realize through colour and line an intangible human voice.

The stream of art history here flowed in two main channels. One was the Katsukawa School, headed by Shunsho, which like the older Torii School devoted itself chiefly to the representation of actors. The other was the school of Harunobu, whose gracious designs of women were the most novel productions of the period. A third school was founded by Toyoharu and a fourth by Shigemasa; but the real importance of these two schools developed only in a later epoch. During this period the great Torii School may be said to have remained dormant; it was to awaken in the Third Period to a new splendour in Kiyonaga.

There is a passage from a contemporary record that throws light on the temper of the people and the artists at this time. I have freely translated it, with the courteous permission of Dr. Julius Kurth (Kurth's "Harunobu," R. Piper & Co., Munich), from his German rendering of a unique manuscript book in his possession, which appears to have been written by the poet Yukura Sanjin, and illustrated by Harunobu in 1769. The book is a whimsical, devil-may-care production of the lightest sort; but from its pages the glitter and surge and laughter of Yedo holiday life rise with a far-away yet curiously distinct echo.

AN EXTRACT FROM "THE STORY OF THE HONEY-SWEETMEAT VENDOR, DOHEI."

"Dohei hails from Oshu. Upon his head he wears a cap; and his mouth
sends up a song when in the Capital of the East he vends his
honey-sweetmeats. His cape is of tiger-skin, and bears a suspicious
resemblance to the loin-apron of the Devil. His umbrella is of
scarlet crêpe, and recalls the plumed spears of the festival-guards.
As his coat of arms he chose a Devil's head and a skeleton; upon his
outer robe he wrote the sign, 'Dohei, Dohei.' While you buy his
honey-sweetmeats, he sings a song of a new style, and ends it with
the refrain, 'Dohei, Dohei!' Therefore the name of Dohei has become
known everywhere. Even the smallest children all sing this song in
chorus over and over a thousand times. If he sells his
honey-sweetmeats in the Eastern part of the city, the people in the
Western streets are furious; if he sells them in the Southern
quarter, the people in the Northern streets are furious. For then
they want to know why he came to them so late.

"If on the three hundred and sixty days of the year one goes, day in
and day out, through all the eight hundred and eight streets, one
finds a tavern at every five paces; and it is as if this city had
been changed into a pond of rice-wine. One cannot take ten steps
without coming upon a shop in which whole mountains of rice-cakes
and other confections are offered. If one hears in the distance an
almost heavenly music, it is the song of a lady to the strum of a
guitar. If there is a rattling like peals of thunder, it is the
ox-carts on the side streets. People with coiffures shaped like the
leaf of the ginko-tree roll up their outer robes and jostle shoulder
to shoulder. Ladies with girdles of spun gold and long-sleeved
girlish dresses sway their hips; and their garments, coloured like
the graining of wood, flow as do torrents of Spring. Their hats of
green paper resemble a clump of trees in Summer. And as they wander
along, the hems of their robes flutter open, and the blood-red silk
linings gleam like maple foliage--though it is not yet Autumn! The
festive white material of their inner robes shines like snow--though
it is not yet Winter! If it were, they would be muffled to their
very noses with crêpe veils. They have arranged their hair as if
surmounted by a cap, like tiers of little chrysanthemums. At their
thighs sparkle tobacco-wallets ornamented with silver and gold.

"The black-and-white prints of earlier days are antiquated now, and
the only thing people care for is the newly-devised gorgeousness of
the Eastern Brocade Pictures. Musical plays are no longer to be
seen; instead, you go to the music-girls and the dancing-girls in
the taverns. The young people want lively entertainment, and visit
the wine-shops. Out of a vase in which, according to the ancient
custom, flowers were formerly placed, lots are now drawn to fix
upon the day for a party; while according to the fashionable
arrangement of flowers in the hanging jars, the flowers look like
arrows from a bow. The vendors of fritters call out, 'Celebrated
Pasties! Celebrated Pasties!' and boast upon the brilliant paper
signs of the just-opened booths, 'Headquarters! Headquarters!'
Handkerchiefs at four coppers apiece hang at the loins of the
servants of Samurais. The song of the New Year's dancers rings out
among people who hitherto had sung only folk-songs. The caligraphist
studies the Nagao style; the poet learns by heart the poems of the
Chinese epoch, and the minstrel the style of the Manyo anthology. To
obtain new remedies for his stock the doctor draws upon the old
school for all kinds of herbs, and cures eyes and noses with
them--just as pumpkins are perfected into melons. Often the priest
of Buddha wanders, an object of derision, through the streets in the
darkness of night in search of a girl. To be sure, he is a very
learned man; but what leads more easily to dangerous labyrinths than
love?

"The theatres in the Sakai Street give performances continuously.
The reconstruction of the Yoshiwara is to be finished in a few days,
and people come and go there only to drink and to sing. They draw
water from the floods of the Sumida River, but it will not be
drained dry! They view again and again the flowers of the Asuka
River, but these also are without end! The Shenshuraku Theatre
enlivens the public, and upon the Banzairaku stage man's life is
idealized. So all are happy--like green firs that become thicker
and thicker and put forth new needles."

Into this crowded world of exuberant life came Harunobu and his contemporaries--into this underworld, if you will, but an underworld more beautiful and sun-drenched than any known to our great Western cities. Instead of the bar in the slum they had the tea-house on the river-bank; instead of the prize-fight they had the cherry festival; for them, vice put on robes of a certain stately beauty; their stage was marked by the same ennobling absence of realism that distinguished the stage of the Greeks. The holiday spirit of the hour seems more spontaneous than ours; their hearts seem less troubled by spiritual confusions. And manifestly their underworld knew beauty and brought forth an art that is now a universal human treasure; while our underworld has been, with the rarest of exceptions, wholly sterile.

One of the most important of the underworld institutions which the prints of this period depict is the theatre. Though Harunobu turned aside from it, his great contemporary Shunsho and the whole body of Shunsho's followers found most of their material there.

The popular theatre had sprung into importance in the days of Moronobu. Previous to that time, the classic lyric drama of the aristocracy, called the Nō, had flourished in the secluded palaces of great nobles; but the mob was obliged to divert itself with nothing more interesting than jugglers and street performers. Therefore when the theatre first came into being, in the river-bed of Kyoto, it achieved great popularity; and when later it was transferred to Yedo, it rose during the Genroku Period (1688-1703) to a position of passionate favour. It appears never to have had a very savoury moral odour; and before long it became associated with so much corruptness that it presented a serious problem for the Tokugawa rulers. In 1643, as a corrective measure, they had decreed the exclusion of female actors from the stage. From this time on, only men trod the Japanese boards; the female rôles were taken by male actors whose skill in this impersonation is said to have been extraordinary.

The status of a great actor in the hearts of the people was not very different from that of a successful prize-fighter among us to-day. He was a popular idol; his movements were the subject of the eager curiosity of the gaping multitude; but his social rank was of the lowest. The prints of a later date show us pictures of actors with their gay companions on boating-parties or tea-house picnics, surrounded by inquisitive throngs of spectators. Famous and greatly sought after as these actors were, they occupied positions of even less esteem than the English players in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Nothing so well illustrates their ostracism from any kind of society as the words used by one of the greatest of actor-painters, Shunsho, in the preface to a book of drawings representing actors: "To be sure, I love the theatre, and greatly enjoy being a spectator, _but I have no connection with the actors themselves, and do not know them in private life_." Even Shunsho, who had created the heroic designs of these men in their great rôles, dared not acknowledge himself as their familiar.

When they appeared on the stage, the faces of the actors were frequently painted with startling streaks of red and white, an effect reproduced in some of the prints. The elaborate robes worn when they represented heroic figures of bygone ages formed superb material for the designs of the artists. The Japanese stage of to-day probably does not differ very much from what it was in Shunsho's time; and we still see on it that florid elaboration of gesture, bombastic delivery, and intensification of facial expression which the prints have perpetuated.

The actors were divided into clans or schools; the name of a famous head of a clan would be handed down for generations from master to pupil. Thus there were many of the name of Danjuro, Hanshiro, and Kikunojo in succession, who were not related to each other by blood. Certain clans such as the Kikunojo specialized exclusively in women's rôles. Each clan had its _mon_ or crest, worn on the sleeve, and each actor had a personal _mon_; in the prints these generally appear. In Plate 20, for example, the circle with eight crossed arrow-buts indicates the _mon_ of Nakamura Matsuye; in other prints, the three great concentric squares of Danjuro, the trisected concentric circles of Hanshiro, or the iris within a circle of Kikunojo (Plate 9), are easily identified.

In the hands of Shunsho and his followers the figures of these actors were used as the material for brilliant designs. For the moment, however, we must return to the foremost artist of this period--one who never loved the actors--Harunobu.

HARUNOBU.

_Figure of a Girl._

Ye winds that somewhere in the West--
In gulfs of sunset, isles of rest--
Rise dewy from prenatal sleep
To strew with little waves the deep--
Surely it is your breath that stirs
These fluttering gauzy robes of hers!

Come whence ye may, I marvel not
That ye are lured to seek this spot;
Your tenuous scarcely breathèd powers
Sway not the sturdier garden flowers,
And had unmanifest gone by
Save that she feels them visibly.

O little winds, her little hands
In time with tunes from fairy-lands
Are moving; and her bended head
Knows nothing of the long years sped
Since heaven more near to earth was hung,
And gods lived, and the world was young.

Her inner robe of tenderest fawn
In cool, faint fountains of the dawn
Was dyed; and her long outer dress
Borrows its luminous loveliness
From some clear bowl with water filled
In which one drop of wine was spilled.

Peace folds her in its deeps profound;
Her shy glance lifts not from the ground;
And through this garden's still retreat
She moves with tripping silver feet
Whose trancèd grace, where'er she strays,
Turns all the days to holy days.

Come! let us softly steal away.
For what can we, whose hearts are grey,
Bring to her dreaming paradise?
A chill shall mock her from our eyes;
A cloud shall dim this radiant air:
Come! for our world is otherwhere.

But O ye little winds that blow
From golden islands long ago
Lost to our searching in the deep
Of dreams between the shores of sleep--
Ye shall her happy playmates be,
Fluttering her robes invisibly.

Polychrome, from eight blocks. Size 11 × 8. Signed _Susuki Harunobu ga_. Gookin Collection.

_Plate 11._]

The few available fragments of information about the life of Susuki Harunobu can be briefly stated. Born between 1725 and 1730, he lived in Yedo all his life in a house near the river. In 1764 he perfected a new and epoch-making treatment of colour-print technique, and died in 1770, not much more than forty years of age. We may, where so little is known, willingly follow Dr. Kurth in his ingenious tracing of a romantic link between Harunobu and the hamlet of Kasamori, whose pine-trees, red temple-torii, and beautiful tea-house waitress O-Sen haunt his work recurrently; but we must be content to regard this as at least half fancy. Harunobu's direct teacher was Shigenaga, and he was influenced early by Toyonobu; but it was to Sukenobu and Kiyomitsu that he turned for the inspiration of those characteristic figures which he created during the six great years of his real activity.

Harunobu's work before the year 1764 is relatively unimportant. It consists of prints of actors and legendary subjects, printed in two or three colours; a few of his _hoso-ye_ prints of this period have charming delicacy of line and colour, and at least one of his actor pillar-prints is a work of notable dignity; but upon the whole his work is not very individual. Any one of a dozen of Shigenaga's pupils might have done almost as well. Before 1764 these men were all his equals; after 1764 he took a step which few could keep pace with and which none could outstrip.

In 1764 he brought forth that synthesis of the resources of his art which was to shake the Ukioye world. Whether he was the actual inventor of polychrome printing is not certain; some authorities attribute the invention to an engraver named Kinroku; but it is very clear that Harunobu was the first to seize upon and realize the possibilities of the discovery. Some technical hindrance, such as the difficulty of securing perfect register from many blocks on the wet stretching sheets, had prevented the earlier completion of the process; and it is possible that it was a printer who discovered the simple device needed to overcome the difficulty. This, however, is a matter of mere mechanics and has no bearing upon the question of the real glory of Harunobu. What is important is that he seized the new technique and made out of it an instrument responsive to every subtlest breath of his beauty-haunted spirit.

Polychrome. Size 11 × 7½. Signed _Harunobu ga_. Chandler Collection.

_Plate 12._]

The old three-colour prints had achieved fine effects by means of powerfully conceived but essentially simple mosaics of colour. Now Harunobu turned the three-stringed lute into the violin, capable of expressing the most delicate modulations of tone. Beginning with combinations of only four or five colours, he gradually increased the number of blocks used. It is certain that he used eight blocks on at least one 1765 calendar print. In the end he had at his command a palette which, by the use of no less than twelve or fifteen blocks, and with the limitless number of shades obtainable by superimposing one colour upon another, made the whole rainbow his. Constant experiment marked his further progress. We have, for example, one print which he originally printed from eight blocks, and later varied by increasing the blocks to ten, and still later to thirteen. From year to year an ever fresh succession of complex colour-harmonies emanated from his fertile brain.

Until the invention of polychrome printing, Harunobu had not adequately expressed himself; now, having found his true instrument, he played divinely. The year 1765 was a Jubilee year, celebrating the nine-hundredth anniversary of the entrance of Sugawara Michigane, the great statesman, painter, and humanist, to the Court of the Emperor. This circumstance, in connection with the desire of literary men to present to their friends specimens of the new prints as New Year cards, led Harunobu to produce a number of dated calendar-prints of this year--a fortunate occurrence which has been of great aid to students of his work. The theory that these dated prints are the expression of Harunobu's naïve exultation over the new discovery is now generally discredited. Since the calendars are dated 1765, Mr. Gookin's suggestion that they were probably made in the last months of 1764 seems reasonable; and this date must therefore be regarded as marking the beginning of polychrome printing.

The brilliant new prints fittingly ushered in the festal year. And the public was not too busy with its celebrations to take note of the change. The new manner with its wealth of colour-beauty won instant popularity; and under the name of "Brocade Pictures of the Eastern Capital" grew to such fame that by 1767 prints in the old style were almost driven out of the market, and Harunobu was unquestioned lord of Ukioye.

It is not strange that in the glow of success and ambition he should have put behind him his old actor-pictures. "I am a Japanese painter," he wrote proudly; "why should I paint the portraits of this vulgar herd?" And at this moment feeling himself akin to the great classical tradition whose refined beauties had been handed down from ancient China mingled with the beauties of poets and sages, he determined that he would lift from the Ukioye School the stigma of vulgarity which the theatre had given it, and invest it with some of that gentle cultivation which fills like light the old Chinese paintings of Ming gardens. Therefore he turned his energies to the depiction of another world than the theatre--the life of aristocratic ladies, of young lovers, of those famed beauties who in humbler station were the flowers and sunshine of the tea-house and the festival. Plate 14 portrays one of these. His method of handling the figures--a peculiar mingling of naïveté and sophistication, like that of a minstrel singing incredible enchanted legends with complete seriousness--was a new and never-recovered note in the history of Ukioye.

Size 11 × 8. Signed _Harunobu ga_. Chandler Collection.

_Plate 13._]

From this time on, during six years, Harunobu produced a series of prints whose grace is unsurpassable. The firm and refined strokes of his brush endowed with a fresh charm all that was lovely in the flowing draperies and serene faces of the young girls of Japan. He was the painter of youth. The type which he introduced was the slender and gracious embodiment of youthful girlhood. And an indescribable delicacy and purity of manner clothes as with clear light these girl-figures of his. His draperies, as in Plate 11, are never drawn naturalistically, but always with a certain conventionalization that produces folds and swirls more abstractly beautiful than a literal rendering. He for the first time in colour-printing made a practice of giving to his figures a background that exhibited fully the scene of their daily lives. Instead of the heroic figures of the Primitives, stalking through space in colossal grandeur, he drew the familiar forms of everyday existence nestling among their natural surroundings. The world he pictures is, however, one of mortals who hardly know the burdens of mortality. Like the women of Botticelli, they seem to poise in an atmosphere of more rarefied loveliness than anything we know in reality. Rich as may have been the beauty of the tea-house girl, O-Sen, whom Harunobu loved and painted, and of the little seller of cosmetics, O-Fuji, who appears many times in his pictures, they were but the starting-point, the exciting agency, from which Harunobu passed on into a secret fanciful world of his own to evoke his dream-maidens. Half of the charm of these figures, such as the one in Plate 12, lies in this unreal and unhuman impression they make; they are not Japanese women or any women, but living fairy-tales, butterfly creatures out of nowhere. All that is joyous and playful in the Japanese spirit lifts them on wings of fantasy into regions of universal delight. They are the most fragrant flowers of Japanese art.

It follows that Harunobu's subjects are almost always light and trivial scenes--a girl playing with a cat, a young man and a maiden walking amiably together, young girls engaged in some delicate occupation, or, as in Plate 13, pausing in pensive reverie. A gentle joy pervades most of them, or at least a gravity so light that it is nearer joy than melancholy. Harunobu does not handle these scenes with any especial insight into life; they are not windows through which we may look and see the human souls of the people he portrays. They are nothing more than gay, pleasing moments--records of fortunate hours--froth and foam over the real deeps of life.

Size 11 × 8. Signed _Harunobu ga_.

_Plate 14._]

Yet as the spectator allows the pure and delicate atmosphere of one of these creations to enter his spirit, he gradually becomes aware that not this trivial scene, not this light episode, was Harunobu's real theme; his real theme was the great harmonics of colour and line. Out of colour and line his immeasurable genius evoked lofty improvisations. He dedicated the fervour of his passion and his vision to the creation of these orchestrations of tone, these modulated arabesques of contour. Beyond his cheerful groups, beyond his felicitous arrangements, lies the history of his prodigious essay to impose his sense of beauty upon one section of chaos. Kurth is quite right when he calls him "the great virtuoso of colour."

Most of Harunobu's prints are of small size, almost square. In this form his refinement found its most perfect expression. If we would see an aspect of Harunobu that is of more impressive proportions, and realize that scope as well as daintiness was in him, we must turn to certain rare pillar-prints which were done chiefly in the years immediately preceding his untimely death. Here dignity combines with grace, and an exalted sweep of composition adds nobility to that exquisite colour which here no less than in his small prints finds place. Two of these pillar-prints, reproduced in Plate 15, may serve to illustrate this last phase of Harunobu's greatest triumph.

The first print is a soft grey and lavender study of a girl. Within the long, narrow space, against a background of cool unbroken grey, rises the figure, whose bent, pensive head looks down at the ball she is dangling before a cat at her feet. Her hair, a mass of strong black against the clear grey background, is drawn in a conventionalized manner that is perhaps the noblest formula ever devised for the painting of hair--as pure of line as a Greek helmet. Drooping from her slender shoulders fall robes whose slow curves seem moulded by the touch of faint and gentle airs that breathe around her. The long drapery is interwoven with hints of mauve melting into rose--more like ghosts of the palette than colours--and touches of translucent salmon and amber and grey are repeated like an arabesque of lights down the folds. The folds sweep in great restful curves like those of vines hanging in festoons from summer branches. At the girl's girdle a strong note of dull green strikes like a bass chord across the composition; and smaller spots of the same colour carry this motive diminishingly down to the bottom of the picture.

It is a sentiment, an emotion, a dream--as much an abstraction as a musical composition. In the lines of the dress, in the poise of the head, in the limpid tones of the whole picture, is secreted the dwelling-place of a peace, a solemnity, an awe never to be forgotten. It is reminiscent of the grandeur of the Primitives, but more etherialized; and there lingers about it still, persisting from earlier times, the penumbra of that hierarchal purity and spirituality peculiar to archaic art. Like those strange and memorable archaic statues of the Priestesses in the Museum of the Akropolis at Athens, like the frescoes of Giotto at Assisi, it holds the secret of an untainted beauty that is lost to later artists.

Size 27 × 4½. Signed _Susuki Harunobu ga_.

HARUNOBU: GIRL PLAYING WITH KITTEN.

Size 26 × 4½. Signed _Susuki Harunobu ga_.

_Plate 15._]

The second pillar-print is one which, following the opinion of Professor Fenollosa and Mr. Gookin, may be regarded as one of the supreme triumphs of Harunobu's career, and one of the greatest prints we know. It represents Shirai Gompachi, the white-robed lover of the beautiful Komurasaki, wandering in disguise with the basket-hat and flute of a _komuso_ or dishonoured Samurai. There is no background; against the clear white paper the long lines of the tall figure flow in curves of jet black and purple-grey, with here and there lights of orange and white. By a simplicity of selection that is more than Greek, Harunobu has woven from these few curves an effect that is like an incantation. It has in it the power to reach into the secret storehouses of the spectator's emotion and awaken echoes from those intimations of eternal perfection which haunt every heart. Fenollosa writes: "There is something unearthly about its line themes, orchestrated in black and ghost-tints, which lifts one to the infinities of Beethoven's purest melodies. The dreamy clarinet-player seems to droop and melt away into regions of sublimity where no earthly ear shall follow his dying chords. Thus indeed we are glad at last to have Harunobu pass, transfigured, from our vision."

_Pillar Print by Harunobu._

From an infinite distance, the ghostly music!
Few and slender the tones, of delicate silver,
As stars are broidered on the veil of evening....

He passes by, the flute and the dreaming player--
Slow are his steps, his eyes are gravely downcast;
His pale robes sway in long folds with his passing.

Out of the infinite distance, a ghostly music
Returns--in slender tones of delicate silver,
As stars are broidered on the veil of evening.

Certain puzzles for the collector and student arise in connection with Harunobu.

This is the first knotty point. Shiba Kokan, a contemporary artist who outlived Harunobu by forty-eight years, is obscurely connected with Harunobu's work. "Look out when you buy Harunobu prints!" he writes in his memoirs, published long after his death. "A great portion of the most popular ones are skilfully forged, and the forger was I, Shiba Kokan!" This warning holds good to-day, and in many cases no one can say with confidence whether certain sheets are by Shiba Kokan or Harunobu. Kokan claims, in particular, to have been the author of those with transparent draperies, those done in the Chinese manner, and those in which snow on bamboos is rendered by embossing without outline blocks. All these and other characteristic beauties of Harunobu's work he would annex, and it is doubtful if we shall ever know whether he is the greatest liar or the greatest forger in history. Probably his statements must be regarded as partly true. Until we know, however, every print signed Harunobu is suspect; for if Shiba Kokan could deceive the public of that day, we shall not be likely to detect his forgeries. There is only one consolation for the collector: if the prints of Shiba Kokan, signed Harunobu, are as beautiful as those of Harunobu, then not the collector is the sufferer, but only the unfortunate person who tries to write an accurate account of this hopeless entanglement.

Other forgers, contemporaneous or slightly later, probably took advantage of Harunobu's popularity: coarse reprints from recut blocks turn up frequently in the market; and, worst of all, very fine modern forgeries and imitations of his work abound. These last two classes are the only ones that need cause the collector anxiety; they should of course be guarded against with the utmost care, for they are quite worthless. Their impure and muddy colours generally betray them to the practised eye. No means of detecting them is safe for the inexperienced amateur except a minute comparison with an unquestioned original impression of the same print. On the other hand, the contemporaneous forgeries, if beautiful, are no inconsiderable treasures.

The name Kyosen furnishes another puzzle. It is signed to prints unmistakably by Harunobu, to prints unmistakably not by him, and to prints which he also signs. The solution seems to be that Kyosen is simply the name of the printer or engraver who did work for Harunobu and for other designers. Kyosen himself sometimes designed prints, but in such cases he signed distinctly as artist. The signature Kyosen does not, therefore, indicate a separate artist, and its presence on Harunobu's prints need not cause doubts as to Harunobu's authorship. Senga, a printer, and Takahashi Gyokushi and Takahashi Rosen, engravers, also signed certain of Harunobu's prints.

A further difficulty arises in the relation of Harunobu to Koriusai, an artist whom we shall soon treat by himself. At times his work comes so close to Harunobu's style that earlier authorities believed his name to be merely a later signature of Harunobu. This position is now entirely discredited, and it is agreed that Koriusai was a distinct person, a friend and successor of Harunobu. But it is not so sure that Koriusai may not have signed certain of his own designs with Harunobu's name after Harunobu's death; the striking resemblances of some such sheets to Koriusai's work makes one unwilling to regard the relation between the two as settled. In the case of certain unsigned prints, it is impossible to determine with assurance which of the two was the creator. As a rule, however, the colour-schemes of the two are totally different, Koriusai running characteristically to schemes in which blue and orange are dominant. Dr. Kurth seems to think it barely possible that prints signed "Koriu" may be by Harunobu; but this theory is untenable, both because the internal evidence of the prints is against it, several of Koriusai's most characteristic prints being thus signed, and because of the difficulty of believing that Harunobu, the greatest of living Ukioye artists, should at the height of his fame have signed to his work the name of a younger and less noted contemporary.

Those prints in the Harunobu manner which are unsigned and unsealed also offer perplexities, since we must look entirely to internal evidence to discover whether they are by Harunobu.

Harunobu's work is among the most highly prized in the whole list. The great collections have many of his prints, but in the market one finds the fine ones to be limited in number. In his case, even more than in the case of other artists, perfect condition is a vital requirement. For, in the process of fading, his prints lose that delicate colour-orchestration which is their supreme glory. The same changes in tone that would hardly detract from the beauty of a fine Kiyomitsu might easily rob a fine Harunobu of most of its significance. If one has once seen the copies in such collections as that of Mr. Frederick W. Gookin, of Chicago, Mr. Charles H. Chandler, of Evanston, Messrs. William S. Spaulding and John T. Spaulding, of Boston, or Mr. Howard Mansfield of New York, one loses all interest in the battered riff-raff of the dealers' counters.

KORIUSAI.

_Koriusai speaks._

Let whoso will take sheets as wide
As some great wrestler's mountain-back
Space cannot hide
His lack.

Take thou the panel, being strong.
'Tis as a girl's arm fashioned right--
As slender and divinely long
And white.

That tall and narrow icy space
Gives scope for all the brush beseems.
And who shall ask a wider place
For dreams?

It is an isle amid the tide--
A chink wherethrough shines one lone star--
A cell where calms of heaven hide
Afar.

One chosen curve of beauty wooed
From out the harsh chaotic world
Shall there in solitude
Be furled.

The narrow door shall be so strait
Life cannot vex, with troubled din,
Beauty, beyond that secret gate
Shut in.

Lo! I will draw two lovers there,
Alone amid their April hours,
With lines as drooping and as fair
As flowers.

I will make Spring to circle them
Like a faint aureole of delight.
Their luminous youth and joy shall stem
The night.

And men shall say: Behold! he chose,
From Time's wild welter round him strown,
This hour; and paid for its repose
His own.

Koriusai's life is shrouded in those mists prevalent in the cases of most Ukioye artists. It is known that he was a Samurai, or feudal retainer of knightly rank; upon the death of his master, Tsuchiya, he became, as was the custom, a ronin--that is, a retainer without a lord--and established himself near the picturesque Ryogoku Bridge in Yedo as a painter. He originally used the name Haruhiro. Shigenaga was his first teacher, Harunobu his second; his work can safely be dated between 1770 and 1781. By the end of this period Kiyonaga was beginning to advance achievements that eclipsed Koriusai's. As Fenollosa points out, it was Koriusai's misfortune to collide with Harunobu at the beginning and with Kiyonaga at the end of his career; could we obliterate those two, we might think of Koriusai as "the most beautiful Ukioye designer."

Size 28 × 4½. Signed _Koriu ga_.

KORIUSAI: TWO LOVERS IN THE FIELDS--SPRING CUCKOO.

Size 27 × 4½. Signed _Koriusai ga_.

_Plate 16._]

Koriusai was already working in Harunobu's manner at the time of the master's death; and afterward he continued Harunobu's experiments. His characteristic device in colour is the predominance of a strong orange pigment, based on lead, which when originally applied had the utmost brilliance, but which now is frequently changed by chemical decomposition into a rich mottled black. Combining this orange with a blue of his own devising, he obtained novel and striking effects.

Koriusai's small prints have often a beauty almost equal to Harunobu's, but they lack individuality of invention. They never surpass the triumphs of the older master in this form. Koriusai seldom can catch Harunobu's perfect grace and repose, his luminous atmosphere and subtle colour. But in his large sheets he produced a few compositions whose elaborate magnificence is a new and individual achievement. The styles in hair-dressing which came into vogue at this time were no small element in enabling him to create his stately figures; the wide lines of the coiffure, more solid and massive than in Harunobu's day, lent itself admirably to strong decorative treatment. In a series of large sheets called "Designs of Spring Greenery," each picture representing an Oiran and her two or more young attendants, some of the prints are disfigured by the heaviness of the faces; but others, from which this exaggeration is absent, are of almost unparalleled splendour in colour, even though somewhat monotonous in their repetitions. One of this type, in the Morse Collection, Evanston (described at No. 155 of Fenollosa's Ketcham Catalogue) is surely one of the greatest prints in the world. Some of Koriusai's designs of birds and other animals, occasionally printed with mica backgrounds, are admirable compositions.

But Koriusai's distinctive glory lies in the sphere of pillar-prints, of which five are reproduced in Plates 16, 17, and 18. This form of composition is one of the most interesting and exacting to be found in the art of any race; the tall sheet, generally about 28 inches high and only 5 inches wide, furnishes a mere ribbon of space that taxes all the resources of a designer. It is like a Greek frieze placed on end; but whereas the frieze gives space for a multitude of processional figures, and is essentially a stage for the depiction of a social pageant, this slim panel demands the exclusion of all but a few significant lines. In this particular it is the finest of art-forms. It exacts the quintessence of selection--one narrow glimpse of some cross-section of life. Its limitations are like those of the lyric, requiring a concentrated and finely chosen vision.

Size 29 × 5. Signed _Koriu ga_.

KORIUSAI: A GAME OF TAG.

Size 26 × 5. Signed _Koriusai ga_.

_Plate 17._]

The shape was first devised by Okumura Masanobu as a modification of the wider and shorter sheets commonly used by the Primitives for their large pictures. As is often the case in the evolution of a fine art-form, it was not Masanobu's mere whim, but structural exigencies, that prompted the invention, the need being to provide long narrow pictures that could be hung upon the square wooden pillar of the Japanese house. Kiyomitsu and Toyonobu used this shape admirably; and the final and most perfect form for its dimensions was fixed and brought into general use by Harunobu. It became a favourite shape among the greatest of the later artists; and no small number of their supreme achievements are in this form. To the modern European eye, no other seems so distinctively characteristic of the special Japanese genius.

Pillar-prints are almost invariably works of the first importance--_pièces de résistance_, deliberate and studied productions, representing the best effort and highest powers of the artist. For they were intended to be mounted and rolled, like _kakemono_; and the artist could therefore foresee for them a degree of attention that he could hardly expect in the case of the loose square sheets. The peculiar shape is in itself so interesting and beautiful, and so ringing a challenge to the powers of the designer, that in many cases the best work of the artist is to be found only in this form.

Pillar-prints are to-day far rarer than prints of the square variety. They were probably produced in editions of smaller numbers than the square prints; and, further, the use to which they were put as hanging pictures exposed them to hazardous vicissitudes and generally resulted in eventual destruction.

Koriusai's variations on the limited themes whose treatment is possible in this narrow space display daring, originality, and power of concentrated selection. He is the supreme master of the pillar-print; no one else has produced so many fine ones, and practically all his finest work is in this form. The infinite variety of his designs and the fertility of his invention make a series of his pillar-prints one of the most absorbing features of a fine collection. In one print (Plate 17), he dashes the intense black line of a screen down through the middle of his picture and sets the delicate eddies of a child's and a young girl's garments playing around its base. In a second (Plate 18), a girl in robes of gorgeous colour stands like a calm peacock, with glowing orange combs alight in her hair; while in a third (Plate 16), the whole space waves and sings with the forms of grasses, a flying cuckoo, and a maiden carried in the arms of her lover through fields of spring. And in a fourth (Plate 17), he draws the figures of two women, one behind and a little above the other, the one in the background luminous with soft neutral tints, the one in the foreground robed in a black whose intensity cuts sharply through the otherwise monotonous sweetness of the picture. To the grace of Harunobu, Koriusai has here added a vigour all his own, and a richness surpassing that of his teacher.

To-day Koriusai's small prints are rather rare, as are also the birds and the large-size sheets. His pillar-prints, which are his greatest works, were produced in such numbers that, contrary to the rule that applies to the pillar-prints of all other designers, a good many of them have survived. It is still possible to secure examples that are among the foremost of all print treasures.

Size 28½ × 5. Unsigned.

KORIUSAI: A COURTESAN.

Size 27 × 4½. Signed _Koriusai ga_.

_Plate 18._]

OTHER FOLLOWERS OF HARUNOBU.

SUSUKI HARUSHIGE is reported to have been the son and pupil of Harunobu. The few prints of his that are known have a grace of line that might well be a son's heritage, if such things were inheritable. The unholy rascal Shiba Kokan alleges that this name was one which he himself used, as well as Harunobu's; it is reported, on the other hand, that it is merely Koriusai's early name. It is probable that Kokan's statement must be believed.

SHIBA KOKAN has already been mentioned as the forger of Harunobu's work. His ability needs no further recommendation when we admit that we cannot with certainty tell his prints from Harunobu's. This is his chief title to fame. He was born in 1747 and died in 1818. During his life he signed many names to his work and attempted many manners. From the Dutch at Nagasaki he learned something of the rules of European perspective, and tried, in the eighties, with success but without much beauty, to carry them over into Japanese art. In addition, he introduced shadows into some of his compositions--a device alien to the whole spirit of Chinese and Japanese painting. He was the first Japanese artist to attempt copper-plate engraving. Queer renderings of European scenes by him remain to us. In a hundred different spheres of art, invention, and speculation he tried his hand. His intellectual curiosity in every field reminds one of Leonardo da Vinci. He remains one of the most interesting and puzzling figures of his time--an adventurer, a restless experimenter, a forger and a man of extraordinary though chaotic genius.

A poem written when he was dying has a curious vibrancy: "Kokan now dies, for he is very old; to the passing world he leaves a picture of the world that passes."

KOMAI YOSHINOBU did work in the style of Harunobu during the seventies. He furnishes another example of the obscurity that covers so much of Japanese print history; for it is not known whether he was an independent artist, or identical with Yamamoto Yoshinobu, who produced two-colour prints in the fifties, or worse yet, an early signature of Koriusai. The first theory is the most probable. His work is rare, beautiful in colour, and well worthy of further research.

MASUNOBU, the second of that name, whose work, in clear, delicate colour and charming arrangement, generally follows Harunobu's closely, is also not definitely located. He appears to have been originally a pupil of Shigenobu and Shigenaga. Most writers erroneously regard him as the same man who, under the name of Sanseido Tanaka Masunobu, produced two-colour prints in the forties, and hand coloured prints still earlier.

One of the Second Masunobu's pillar-prints, representing a girl with an open umbrella jumping from a balcony to meet a waiting lover, has a unique and most charming individuality of poise and colouring. His pillar-prints, of which about ten are known, are particularly fine.

UJIMASA, KAMEGAKI HOŌRIU, MURANOBU, TACHIBANA MINKO, BANTO, CHIRYU, RYUSHI, KISEN, and SUIYO are rare men who worked contemporaneously with Harunobu. The Hayashi Catalogue also names SHOHA, SOAN, SOGIKU, KOGAN and SEIKO.

KUNINOBU is an artist of extreme rarity, whose few surviving prints show distinction of line, based on the Harunobu manner. His work, done about 1775, stands out from the work of Harunobu's horde of followers; he was evidently a noteworthy artist, of whom one wishes we knew more.

FUJINOBU worked in the manner of Harunobu in the early seventies. His output was small, and little of his work survives. It may be that he was the same individual as Yamamoto Fujinobu, who has already been mentioned as Shigenaga's pupil.

KOMATSUKEN is a name signed to certain calendar-prints for the year 1765. The style is greatly like Harunobu's. His name may also be read _Shoshoken_. Mr. Gookin thinks him to be identical with Fusanobu, who has been previously mentioned.

HARUTSUGU and SUSUKI HARUJI, said by some to be the same person, produced a few pleasing prints about 1770.

SHUNSHO.

_Portrait of an Actor in Tragic Rôle._

His soul is a sword;
His sword with the spirit's breath
Is bathed of its terrible lord,
In whose eyes is death.

And the massive control,
And the lighted implacable eye
Leash a fierce and exalted soul
Of dark destiny.

. . . . . .

With the strength of the hills--
Kiso's iron mountains of snow--
He waits: time brings and fulfills
The hour for the blow.

He waits; and the white
Full robes round his shoulders sway,
With woof of pale orange alight,
Pale green, pale grey.

Like a falcon, flown
To bleak mid-regions of sky,
He poises. One image alone
Holds his sinister eye--

A vision, a prey
Towards which he shall soon be hurled--
And his fury shall darken the day,
And his joy, the world.

. . . . . .

A music enfolds him
Like the thunders that are poured
Across heaven; it holds him
With the song of the sword.

It enthrals, it inspires,
And its zenith shall be
Lightning of unleashed desires
Crashing along the sea.

Size 12 × 6. Signed _Shunsho ga_.

_Plate 19._]

Those actor-types which Harunobu and his school so scornfully cast aside became the chosen speciality of the greatest of his rivals and contemporaries, Katsukawa Shunsho. As one examines sheet after sheet of Shunsho's theatrical prints, Harunobu's contemptuous words concerning "this vulgar herd," the actors, lose their significance; for here pass in gorgeous procession a series of lofty, intense, and unforgettable figures charged with the quintessence of heroic force.

The designer of these prints was born in 1726 and died about 1792--some authorities say 1790. His period of greatest activity covered the years 1765 to 1780, thus including the working periods of both Harunobu and Koriusai, and ending as Koriusai's did when in the eighties Kiyonaga's star rose blindingly. He lived for a while at the house of his publisher, Hayashi; sometimes in his early work he used in place of a signature a seal shaped like a small covered jar with handles, on which Hayashi's name is inscribed. The legend is that he was too poor to own a seal in the early days of his struggle and so borrowed that of his landlord!

Shunsho had no antecedent teachers among the print-designers. He sprang instead from a school of painters who did not design for prints. These, headed by Choshun and his son Katsukawa Shunsui, had since 1700 been producing rich paintings of women in elaborate drapery. The Buckingham Collection contains one print by Shunsui, but it is an almost unique rarity. Shunsho, by a curious shift in the stream of art history, not only took up prints, but even took up the department of prints least in line with the tendencies of his own school, the department of actor-representation, which was the speciality of Kiyomitsu and the old Torii School, and which Harunobu's popular innovations had almost driven out of fashion. To this work Shunsho brought the new technique of Harunobu and great native individuality; and with the fresh armament of full colour he defended magnificently the threatened stronghold of actor-prints. His popularity became enormous. He grew quickly to the stature of one of the great and far-reaching powers in Ukioye history. Side by side with Harunobu, he in his separate field executed year by year actor-portraits which by their vigour of line and brilliancy of colour-combination take a place as high as that held by the works of his rival.

No contrast could be more striking than that between them. The one is all grace, the other all force; the one loves to linger in quiet gardens, the other drags us up to the icy heights of tragic crisis. Shunsho's sense of dramatic composition was keen; and, as we see in Plate 19, his ferocious actor-faces peer out with a vivid menace, his tense actor-limbs shake with a concentrated and imprisoned fury not the less impressive because of its intentional exaggeration. They have not Harunobu's unreality of perfect grace, but the utterly different super-reality of magnified passion. In repose they are like statues; in action they have the vigour of those natural forces--waves, river currents, storms of thunder--which, as in the Shunsho print reproduced on the cover of this volume,[Transcriber's Note: The edition used to produce this etext did not include this print on the cover.] so often form their backgrounds.

Size 11 × 5½. Unsigned.

_Plate 20._]

Shunsho's figures of women--or rather his figures of men acting the parts of women, according to the invariable custom of the Japanese stage at this time--are less violent, but often as tense. Two of these appear in Plates 20 and 21. In long sweeping robes of brilliant dye they move with the step of a Clytemnestra, or poise in strange attitudes of arrested motion not unworthy of an Antigone. All his figures are dynamic--the storehouses of volcanic forces whose existence he suggests by restless line-conflicts.

Shunsho's predecessors in actor representation had never equalled the intensity of these figures and faces. Shunsho tears the heart out of a rôle and holds it up for us to see. He gives the passion of the actor such expression as would have been impossible to Kiyonobu, twisting the face into a distorted and grandiose mask beside which the faces of the Primitives seem wooden and meaningless.

The spectator whose æsthetic sense embraces only a love of tranquillity will find no beauty in these disturbing faces and forms--unless perhaps the beauty of pure colour is enough to beguile him. It may well do this; few things have power to bring a richer sense of æsthetic satisfaction than a succession of fine Shunshos, in each one of which a new colour-arrangement unfolds new harmonies.