Chapter VI: The Fourth Period: the Decadence (1)

FROM THE RETIREMENT OF KIYONAGA TO THE DEATH OF UTAMARO (1790-1806)

The change that confronts us as we turn from the period of Kiyonaga to that of Utamaro, Yeishi, and Toyokuni is one whose significance is not at first sight wholly clear. We find the sound and classic figures of Kiyonaga gradually replaced by new and fascinating types--slender drooping bodies, wonderfully piled coiffures, elaborately brocaded robes; and the virile drawing of the earlier master gives way to the sinuous curves and arresting plasticity of the new designers. The favourite types of this time are almost as unreal as those of the Primitives, but they convey a totally different feeling; on the one hand, in their curious perverted way, they are far more realistic than the Primitives ever dreamed of being; and on the other hand, they seem the products of minds weary of reality, who turn to the phantasies of the not wholly normal spirit for their ideals and their consolations.

It must not be supposed, however, that the transition to this style of the Decadence was a sudden one. The painters who had most perfectly assimilated the style of Kiyonaga were the very ones who, in this period, turned to the depiction of figures in which every line betrays the weariness of the hour and its craving for novelty. The apex of creative energy in this art had been reached and the inevitable decline was under way.

Of the forces that produced this decline we have comparatively little knowledge. Fenollosa's account of the social conditions of the period throws some light upon the problem. "It was," he says, "a period of crisis in Tokugawa affairs. The cleavage between the aristocratic and the plebeian strata of Japanese life, which had become placidly conscious of itself in the days of Genroku, now threatened a moral, a social, if not a political disruption. The new factors of popular education--art, prints, illustrated books, the theatre, novels, contact with the Dutch at Nagasaki--all had stimulated the spirit of inquiry and of unrest which had penetrated back in investigation to the facts of the Shogun's usurpation; which wrote new, popular histories of the national life; which gave plays and novels a semi-political aim. This deeper wave of self-consciousness on the part of the people was met by the authorities with sterner repressions. The better elements that might have drifted into improving the popular standards in pleasure and art were driven out by a strict censorship. There was thus a sort of natural, or unnatural, selection which tended to isolate and give prominence to the coarser side of the popular feeling. If the issue were squarely made between Confucius and rank demoralization, there was little resource for the commoner but to choose the latter. Thus there arose a sort of alliance between the theatre and the houses of pleasure on the one hand, and the disaffected among the literary and political agitators upon the other. Men, great men who sowed the seeds of the revolution which ripened in 1868, had to flee for asylum, not to Buddhist temples, but to the labyrinths of the Yoshiwara, where, in the care of a romantic love lavished upon them by its then highly cultivated _hetairæ_, they could print and disperse, from their hidden presses, seditious tracts which set the heart of the nation on fire. It was not the ideals of a ripe self-consciousness, such as Kiyonaga had attempted; it was a struggle of living desires against outworn conventions and hopeless tyrannies. Hence, the two phases of a new Ukioye art--its pressure outward toward fuller scientific realisms, and its frank recreations in the vulgarities of its surroundings."

In addition to the restlessness growing out of such political conditions, we should remember that it is not the nature of the human race to be satisfied even with perfection for very long. Kiyonaga, with all his placid beauty, could not forever suffice men who felt themselves to be living as passionately "modern" lives as we do to-day. Change was required to keep them interested; and since the idealization of sound vitality could hardly be pushed farther than Kiyonaga had taken it, the obvious path for the artist lay in the direction of fantastic variations on the old theme and in the idealization of the erotic phantoms evoked by uneasy weariness. New refinements had to be introduced; new emotions had to be stirred; and the unending search for novelty led in due time to strained efforts, perverted mannerisms, and distorted outlooks upon life.

So much for that part of the decadence which was due merely to the desire for change. But there was another element of even more definite operation. It is fairly clear that part of the fatal development resulted from that slow drift toward realism which we have seen growing, period by period, since the days of the Primitives. The age of Harunobu, with its new technical resources, had abandoned pure decoration and aspired to put into its designs something of the flavour of life. The age of Kiyonaga, with its complete mastery of technique, had projected into its designs its observation of real beings--drawn with a fine idealization, but nevertheless based on a deep fidelity to concrete forms. The age of Utamaro had a choice of only two steps left to take if it were to advance to any new position--a step in the direction of still closer fidelity to nature, or a step in the direction of complete revolt from naturalism into regions of wild phantasy. Characteristically, it took both!

Particular instances will show this. Utamaro and Sharaku recorded the peculiarities of real things with a sharpness of observation and an accuracy of rendering that the earlier artists had never approached. And at the same time they used these sharply mastered details of nature as mere brick and mortar out of which to construct fantastic edifices of the most unbridled imagination. Because they were geniuses, they did this and created masterpieces; but they left to later times and lesser artists only the sterile heritage of a deadening realism which they had found it convenient to employ, but to which they themselves had never been truly subject.

At the beginning of this period Yeishi, Choki, Sharaku, and the young Utamaro produced work that ranks quite as high in beauty as that of preceding days. Yeishi's visionary figures of women, drawn with a disembodied and fragile grace, are in their way matchless things, whose only fault is their lack of virile strength. Choki's finest works are wholly beyond praise. Sharaku, the supreme master of actor-portraits and one of the great artists of the world, created designs of stupendous power; if there is any trace of decadence in him it is not weakness but brutality. Utamaro, in his earlier years at least, was as wholesome as Kiyonaga; and even when, in later times, he turned to figures that have about them an indescribable atmosphere of languor and decline, he made of them designs that are to many people the most beautiful productions of the whole school. In all of these men, technical power and sense of composition were of unimpaired vigour. Why, then it may be asked, should we speak of the decadence?

The answer lies partly in the fact that these productions, as a rule, express in their languid or overstrained figures tendencies of emotional super-refinement and nervous tension that impress every beholder with a sense of disintegration, and partly in the history of later days. For the moment, the rivalry between the great men of the period was so keen as to sustain what was, after all, the dying effort of their art. The successes of each one spurred the others on to new types and new feverish devices, feeding thus the flames of the desire for novelty among the people. But the end was at hand. By 1800, in the later work of Utamaro, in most of the work of Toyokuni, and in practically all the work of their followers, genuine artistic weakness appeared, sensationalism took the place of vigour, garishness supplanted harmony, and crude emotions, crude drawing, crude colour became the common feature. The ancient sense of style gave way to a desire to push pictorial effects beyond their legitimate boundary, and the edge of the abyss was in sight.

But before that moment came there remained sixteen years in the productions of which we shall find beauties less sane and sound than those of Kiyonaga, but nevertheless perpetually delighting.

HOSODA YEISHI.

_Portrait of a Woman._

Out of the silence of dead years
Your slender presence seems to move--
A fragrance that no time outwears--
A perilous messenger of love.

From far your wistful beauty brings
A wonder that no lips may speak--
A music dumb save as it clings
About your shadowy throat and cheek.

Longing is round you like that haze
Of luminous and tender glow
Which memory in the later days
Gives vanished days of long ago.

And he who sees you must retrace
All sweetness that his life has known,
And with the vision of your face
Link some lost vision of his own.

The long curves of your saffron dress--
The outline of your delicate mould--
Your strange unearthly slenderness
Seem like a wraith's that strayed of old

Out of some region where abide
Fortunate spirits without stain,
Where nothing lovely is denied,
And pain is only beauty's pain.

. . . . . .

Strange! that in life you were a thing
Common to many for delight,
Thrall to the revelries that fling
Their gleam across the fevered night--

A holy image in the grasp
Of pagans careless to adore;
A pearl secreted in the clasp
Of oozy weeds on some lost shore.

My thought shrinks back from what I see,
And wanders dumb in poisoned air--
Then leaps, inexplicably free,
Remembering that you were fair!

. . . . . .

Belovèd were you in your prime
By one, of all, who came as guest,--
A wastrel strange, whose gaze could climb
To where your beauty lit the west.

One,--in whose secret heart there moved
Some far and unforgotten stir
Of ancient, holy beauties loved,--
Here paused, a sudden worshipper.

Methinks he moved in dusks apart
Through that profound and trembling hour
When you within his doubting heart
Touched all the desert into flower.

And where you rose a world's delight,
For him the dark veils from you fell,--
As earthly clouds from star-strewn night
Withdraw, and leave a miracle.

Not Oiran then, but maid; remote
From tyrant powers of waste desire.
Who drew these hands, this slender throat,
Saw you 'mid skaken winds of fire.

You were a shape of wonder, set
To crown the seeking of his days.
For you his lonely eyes were wet;
With you his soul walked shrouded ways.

And though the burning night might keep
You servient to some lord's carouse,
For him you rose from such a deep
With maiden dawn-light on your brows.

. . . . . .

Pale Autumn with ethereal glow
Hovered your delicate figure near;
And ever round you whispered low
Her voices, and the dying year.

A year--a day--and then the leaves
Purpureal, ashen, umber, red,
Wove for you both through waning eves
A gorgeous carpet gloomward spread.

And with that waning, you had gone,
Through changes that love fears to trace--
No later lover could have known
Your wistful and alluring face--

Your music, quivering in thin air,
Had fled with life that filled your veins--
But he for whom you were so fair
Dreamed; and the troubled dream remains.

. . . . . .

Time, that is swift to smite and rend
The common things that spring from earth,
Dares not so surely set an end
To shapes of visionary birth.

There often his destroying touch
Lingers as with a lulled caress,
Adding, to that which has so much,
An alien ghostly loveliness.

So shall your beauty, crescent, pass
From me through many a later hand,
Each year more luminous than it was--
O April out of Sunset Land!

The career of Hosoda Yeishi as a print-designer began about 1780 at the time when Kiyonaga was in full sway, and lasted until shortly after the beginning of the nineteenth century--a date when Kiyonaga had for some years been in retirement. Thus in Yeishi perhaps more fully than in any other artist except Utamaro may be observed the crucial transition from the period of Kiyonaga to the period of complete decline.

Yeishi was originally a noble of high rank who studied under Kano Yeisen, the court painter; and not even in the last years of his career, when vulgarizing influences were dominant, did he lose the refinement and aristocratic delicacy that are his most striking characteristics. Shortly before he became a Ukioye painter he had been attached to the household of the Shogun Iyeharu. It is not difficult to imagine the horror of Yeishi's early circle of associates when he threw over conventionality and station, and plunged into the _vie de Bohème_ of a popular painter. "This youth," remarks Fenollosa, "doubtless shocked all his friends in tiring of the solemn old Chinese poets who had been gliding about in impossible landscapes since Tanyu first labelled them, and of the semi-serious, long-headed old gods who gave knowing winks to their turtles and storks, and in running off to such abominable haunts of the cow-headed Buddhist Satan as Danjuro's theatre-pit, fragrant with the odours of _saki_ and raw fish, or the lantern-hung balconies of merry damsels on the river-boats."

But the elegant court gentleman was not destined to sink in the maelstrom. To this underworld he brought his own subtlety of vision and evoked from it figures of unfading beauty. At the outset Kiyonaga was his guide--a guide perhaps too blindly followed. Certainly Yeishi's first productions, superb as they were, cannot be called his most characteristic. Plate 35 is an example. They are wholly in the Kiyonaga manner except that they have a touch of fragility and delicacy that is alien to Kiyonaga. The proportions of the figures are the same, but Yeishi's curves are less naturalistic; they seem the product of one whose hungry visions lapped like waves against the shore of reality, shaping it into contours determined by their own demands. The "feeling of repose" which Mr. Strange notes is not repose at all but weariness. At first the perfect poise of these forms may deceive us; but as we advance along the calendar of Yeishi's work we find it pervaded by a spirit less serene, more high-strung, more drugged with beauty than was Kiyonaga's.

One sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. Signed _Yeishi ga_.

_Plate 35._]

In what we may call Yeishi's second style, he gives the peculiarities of his nature full expression. The tall slender figures cease to recall Kiyonaga's; the robust vigour goes out of them; they become impalpable, wistful creatures, hovering before us with slow grace, moving by us in grave procession. These beautiful women are like creatures seen in a dream; they have the solemnity and aloofness of priestesses intent on the performance of secret rites. Their long robes sweep in stately pageant; their delicate heads bend in exquisite weariness.

Fenollosa strangely speaks of the "keenness of Yeishi's characterizations," and says that, "with no idealizations to trouble him, he put down what he saw as frankly as a young reporter." This is a surprising misinterpretation. Yeishi was perhaps more notably a visionary than any other Ukioye artist; he was haunted by supersensible intimations, perverted by a search for unearthly beauty. A fascinating painter! He has not the brilliancy and versatility of Utamaro; but the taste is hard to please which finds monotony in his series of perfections. In his second period--his most individual and powerful--he produced compositions that are hardly inferior to Kiyonaga's. Yeishi may be regarded as one of the few designers who perfectly mastered the triptych form. His arrangements are simpler than Kiyonaga's but no less beautiful. A notable series depicting various polite occupations from the life of Prince Genji are so harmonious in design, so lovely in colour, and so instinct with spiritual refinement as to rank among his finest works. In some of these triptychs Yeishi introduces his interesting colour-invention--a scheme of grey, yellow, violet, blue, and black, which he handles superbly. Among his other triptychs, "The Treasure Ship" is especially notable. In this print, a barge whose prow is shaped like the head and breast of the mythical _Hoho_ bird seems adrift on a river of peace; its wonderful freight--nine noble ladies engaged in the refined entertainments of paintings, games, and poetry--express the nostalgia of Watteau's figures and the line-beauty of Botticelli's. The repose of heaven is upon them, and the delicate satiety of heavenly beings.

Yeishi was one of the few painters besides Shunman who successfully managed grey as a dominant tone. In certain of his prints he produced notable results in this manner, using a style in which lights of yellow and purple are arranged with beautiful effect. Sometimes, though rarely, he omitted them altogether, as in Plate 37, and contented himself with modulations of pure grey that are the last word in subtlety.

Yellow background. Size [Transcriber's note: Dimension missing in original.] × 10. Signed _Yeishi ga_.

_Plate 36._]

He produced a considerable number of notable full-size sheets depicting single figures of women seated or kneeling, engaged in gracious occupations such as flower-arrangement. Some of these are without background; others have backgrounds of pale grey wash; while still others, perhaps the finest of all, stand out against luminous yellow grounds. One of these appears in Plate 36. In these prints is displayed Yeishi's power to draw exquisitely the long sweeping curves of draperies; and the strangely pensive, hieratic quality of his faces is at its best. Their charm lies not in the brushwork, which is never as free and bold as Kiyonaga's, but in the sentiment of remote beauty of which these haunting curves are such pure symbols. He also produced a number of groups of courtesans on parade, with little or no background, after the fashion inaugurated by Koriusai and Kiyonaga. These appear stiff beside Kiyonaga's; but they have nevertheless great charm of line and colour. His album of the Thirty-six Poetesses, about 1800, is a series of fantastic and gorgeous colour-dreams. His series of standing women against chocolate or silver backgrounds rises in colour to the level of Sharaku.

Yeishi could not, however, escape the influence of the growing decadence. The public taste at the end of the eighteenth century was debased by a craving for gaudy eccentricities. Utamaro led in the rush to gratify this craving; and even the aristocratic Yeishi was unable to resist the general decline. Therefore toward the end of his career as a print-designer his work greatly altered. His figures grew very tall and willowy; their necks became so exaggeratedly thin that they seem unable to support the great pile of the coiffure; an attenuated snakyness distinguishes their lines; and the curves of their garments are distorted into the most fantastic folds and swirls. It was in this period that Yeishi produced most of his large bust-portraits on yellow or mica grounds; in these he followed the lead of Utamaro, who had influenced him considerably during his whole career. The noble and grave faces of his earlier days became wooden and distorted; and when Yeishi at last stopped print-designing and returned to the life of society and painting from which he had been so long a renegade, the loss was not a great one; for the degradation of the age's taste had engulfed him--as, indeed, it did all his contemporaries.

Yeishi's ordinary work is not particularly rare. Even his slightest prints have so much charm that they may be highly recommended to the attention of the modest collector. Yeishi's important works are of great scarcity. His figures on yellow or mica ground, his grey prints, his large heads, and his pillar-prints are quite as difficult to obtain as any of the prints of this or the preceding period; his best triptychs are extraordinarily hard to procure.

Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Printed in several tones of grey. Size 15 × 10. Signed _Yeishi ga_. Metzgar Collection.

_Plate 37._]

YEISHO.

Of Yeishi's many pupils, Shokosai Yeisho stands out as the most important. Nothing is known of him except that his work was done toward the end of the eighteenth century.

Yeisho may be regarded as the veritable shadow of Yeishi. He wholly adopted his master's style; but he was not able to impart to his figures that reserved aristocratic poise which was Yeishi's distinguishing mark. Instead, Yeisho's figures not infrequently have a certain very pleasing and plausible elegance, fuller and rounder than his master's. His curves sweep more assertively and less subtly; and his decorative effects are often superb even though not particularly complex. He too passed from the manner of Kiyonaga into that of Utamaro; but his middle period is his most characteristic. In this he produced many fascinating single sheets of seated or kneeling women, several admirable pillar-prints, as in Plate 33, some large bust-portraits that are perhaps his finest works, and a number of triptychs. These last, as a rule, lack the element that is the real glory of the triptych--a broadly grasped correlation of complex elements into one great harmonious composition. Yeisho's triptychs are merely three sheets placed side by side with only a rudimentary attempt at unification. But so completely attractive are the separate figures and the great sweeping curves of his best work that these triptychs are nevertheless delightful productions--more striking than many a subtler composition. They have, however, a stereotyped quality that makes one unwilling to take Yeisho very seriously as an artist. His curves sweep splendidly, but they are dominated by a formula.

Yeisho's works are not common; they are far rarer than Yeishi's. Yeisho may serve to illustrate the difficulty of appraising these artists. I had hardly written the foregoing estimate of Yeisho when I received as a gift from a friend a large bust-portrait of a woman by Yeisho which is so unexpectedly magnificent and so much finer than any work of Yeisho's I had ever seen that my previous opinion had to be modified. In subtlety of line and delicacy of colour this head is at least equal to Utamaro's finest works in the same manner; it utterly contradicts my previous impression of Yeisho's stereotyped quality. Now, what has happened to me in the case of Yeisho is happening to students of Japanese prints every day; and not until the last secreted treasure is brought to light and made known can we be confident that we are even approximately right in the ranks which we assign to the various designers.

OTHER PUPILS OF YEISHI.

Yeishi's vigour, barely sufficient to create his own exquisite works, could not transmit itself to any very vital body of pupils. Though his disciples were many, no one of them achieved independent renown; the seeds of life were not in the teacher. Out of a large number, the following pupils may be named as the most important:--

ICHIRAKUTEI YEISUI, of whom nothing is known, inherited from his master an elegance of line that is often pleasing. He cannot, however, be regarded as an important or original artist. His large bust-portraits, with charming piquant faces, are his best-known works. His prints are rare but not especially sought after.

GOKYO, an interesting artist who probably died young, worked in the same manner as Yeishi. His prints, soft and pleasing in colour, are very rare indeed; the few known examples of his work have a distinction worthy of more attention than they have hitherto received. Had he lived he might have given the school of Yeishi a fresh fame.

YEIRI, of whom not much is known, sometimes signed himself "Yeishi's pupil Yeiri." He is to be distinguished from the almost contemporaneous Rekisenti Yeiri. The latter worked more in the style of Utamaro; his work is rare, and his finest prints are beautiful and valuable. It was Yeishi's pupil Yeiri who created that rare and astonishing portrait of Kitao Masanobu which must take a place beside the most brilliant portraiture of any time or land.

YEISHIN is known only by half a dozen prints; these, though attractive, are not as greatly prized as their scarcity might lead one to expect.

CHOTENSAI YEIJU is a slightly stiff and not very interesting disciple whose work is rare.

YEICHO also is notable chiefly for his rarity.

YEIRU followed his master with little originality.

YEIKI and SŌRAKU are later unimportant pupils who followed Utamaro also.

UTAMARO.

_Portrait of a Woman._

In robes like clouds of sunset rolled
About the dying sun,
In splendid vesture of purple and gold
That a thousand toiling days have spun
For thee, O imperial one!--

With the cunning pomp of the later years,
With their pride and glory and stress,
Thou risest; and thy calm forehead bears
These like a crown; but thy frail mouth wears
All of their weariness.

Thou art one of the great who mayest stand
Where Cleopatra stood:
Aspasia, Rhodope, at each hand;
And even the proud tempestuous mood
Of Sappho shall rule thy blood.

Thy throat, in its slender whiteness bare,
Seems powerless to sustain
The gorgeous tower of thy gold-decked hair--
Like a lily's stem which the autumn air
Maketh to shrink and wane.

More haunting music, more luring love
Round thy sinuous form hold sway
Than the daughters of earth have knowledge of
For thou art the daughter of fading day,
Touched with all hope's decay.

And the subtle languor, the prismic glow
Of a ripeness overpast
Burns through the wonderful curving flow
Of thy garments; and they who love thee know
A loathing at the last.

For they are the lovers of living things--
Stars, sunlight, morning's breath;
But thou, for all that thy beauty brings
Such songs as the summer scattereth--
Thou art of the House of Death.

. . . . . .

But there was one in thy golden day
Who saw thy poppied bloom,
And loved not thee but the heart's decay
That filled thee, and clasped it to be alway
His chosen and sealèd doom.

He who this living portrait wrought,
Outlasting time's control,
A dark and bitter nectar sought
Welling from poisoned streams that roll
Through deserts of the soul.

Ah, dreamer! come at last where dreams
Can serve no more thy need,
Who hast by such bright silver streams
Walked with thy soul that now earth seems
A waste where love must bleed--

Thou whom such matchless beauty filled
Of visions frail and lone,
For thee all passion now is stilled;
Thy heart, denied the life it willed,
Desireth rather none.

And thee allure no verdant blooms
That with fresh joy suspire;
But blossoms touched with coming glooms,
And weariness, and spent desire,
Draw to thy spirit nigher.

Wherefore is nothing in thy sight
Propitious save it be
Brushed with the wings of hovering night,
Worn with the shadow of delight,
Sad with satiety.

For thou hast enmity toward all
The servants of life's breath;
One mistress holdeth thee in thrall,
And them thou lovest who her call
Answer; and she is Death.

. . . . . .

Now Death thy ruined city's streets
Walketh, a grisly queen.
And there her sacred horror greets
Him who invades these waste retreats,
Her sacrosanct demesne--

In robes like clouds at sunset rolled
About the dying sun,
In splendid vestments of purple and gold
That a thousand perished years have spun
For her, the Imperial One.

Utamaro, the central and in some ways the most fascinating figure of this period, has been from the first a great favourite in the esteem of European collectors. His graceful, sinuous women are the images that come most readily to the minds of many people at the mention of Japanese prints. In his own time and land his popularity was equalled by that of no other artist.

It was by his portraits of women that Utamaro won his great fame. Passing outside the influence of Kiyonaga, he developed in his designs of the last decade of the nineteenth century his characteristic feminine type. Her strange and languid beauty, the drooping lines of her robes, her unnatural slenderness and willowiness, are the emanations of Utamaro's feverish mind; as her creator he ranks as the most brilliant, the most sophisticated, and the most poetical designer of his time. His life was spent in alternation between his workshop and the haunts of the Yoshiwara, whose beautiful inhabitants he immortalized in prints that are the ultimate expression of the mortal body's longing for a more than mortal perfection of happiness. Wearied of every common pleasure, he created these visions in whose disembodied, morbid loveliness his overwrought desires found consolation.

Mica background. Size 12½ × 9. Signed _Utamaro, hitsu_. Chandler Collection.

_Plate 38._]

Utamaro was born in 1753 in the province of Musachi. Early in life he went to Yedo and there studied under the noted Kano painter and book-illustrator Toriyama Sekiyen, whom some authorities say was his father. Almost from the beginning of his career he lived with the famous publisher Tsutaya, who issued his prints; and this relation continued up to the date of Tsutaya's death in 1797.

In Utamaro's early work, which began with an illustrated book in 1776, the influence of Kiyonaga was strong. Shunsho's and Kitao Masanobu's characteristics are sometimes also visible, but Kiyonaga's style is the dominating one. Some of his early work is signed Toyoaki.

In 1780 the first important product of Utamaro's career saw the light--his famous "Gifts of the Ebb-Tide"--a book of exquisitely conceived and delicately printed representations of shells and rocks on the seashore. The effort of a trained conchologist to produce accurate descriptive drawings of these objects could hardly achieve a more scrupulous fidelity than do these pages, which have in addition an æsthetic charm of a high order. The same characteristic appears in his celebrated "Insect Book" of 1788. These two works, dominated by a scientific realism that was new to Ukioye, may serve as an indication of the growth of that naturalistic spirit whose effect upon the stylistic ideals of the art was later to be so destructive.

In the decade between 1780 and 1790 Utamaro produced many additional books. Notable among them are the "Customs of New Year's Day" (1786), "The Mad Full Moon," a series of lovely moonlight landscapes in monochrome (1789), and "The Silver World," a series of delicate snow scenes (1790). The single-sheet prints which he issued during this decade are exceedingly beautiful works of a type that the inexperienced eye would never recognize as Utamaro's. The figures are like those of Kiyonaga's prime, but drawn with a slenderness of line and restlessness of poise that strikes a different and shriller note. His work of this period may be distinguished by the fact that the signature is written in a squarer, more compact, and more formal manner than the sprawling, cursive signature of his later days. The two long, tail-like lines of the later signature, by which even the casual tourist learns to recognize Utamaro's name, are wholly absent.

With 1790 begins the classic period of Utamaro's work. This was the year of Kiyonaga's retirement and, according to some authorities, of Shunsho's death. With the two giants of the older generation gone, Utamaro was left to compete for leadership with Yeishi, Shuncho, Choki, Toyokuni, and the lesser men. During the decade from 1790 to 1800 Utamaro was, except for the isolated figure of Sharaku, outstandingly the most versatile and brilliant among them. All were profoundly influenced by him, and he had not a few imitators who attempted to profit by his popularity.

One of a Series "Beautiful Women compared with the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road." Size 15 × 10. Signed _Utamaro, hitsu_.

_Plate 39._]

During this last decade of the nineteenth century Utamaro produced the greatest of his works. Among these must be counted the remarkable series of half-length figures on silver backgrounds, for which no admiration can be too extreme. One of them appears in Plate 38. The type of face which Utamaro drew in these prints differs from the Kiyonaga type; it has something of the girlishness of Harunobu or Sukenobu--wholesome, rounded, with eyes that are large and not narrowed to slits as in his later years, and with coiffure of modest proportions. It resembles the type characteristic of Choki at this time. These charming figures, drawn with subtle precision, stand against their dull silver backgrounds in colours whose few and soft tones produce an effect so harmonious as to almost justify Von Seidlitz in calling Utamaro "the first colourist of his nation." The prints of this class are as rare as they are beautiful. The collector who is familiar with nothing but the later work of the artist can have only an imperfect conception of the greatness of Utamaro. They constitute the purest and most tranquil of his productions, and perhaps the high point of his genius.

This 1790 decade, when Utamaro was at the zenith of his powers, saw many triumphs besides the silver-portraits. He was incessantly busy with experiments of every kind; pushed by the keen competition of Yeishi, Choki, and the others, he laboured incessantly for new effects and passed on to new manners. Plates 39 and 41 are examples. Discarding the type of head that had appeared in the silver-portraits, he devised that more restless, haunting type by which we best know him. The ethereal and supple bodies, the slender necks, the slightly strained poses, all indicate the nervous hyper-æsthetic tension of the hour. Toward the end of the decade his peculiarities grew even more marked. The necks of his figures became incredibly slender; the bodies took on unnatural length; a snaky languor pervaded them. One print, his famous "Woman Seated on the Edge of a Veranda," reproduced in Plate 40, may serve as representative of them all. The drawing of the draperies and of the figure beneath them is studied with extraordinary fidelity; in fact, so human and real a figure is hardly to be found in the work of any preceding artist. But on the other hand, Utamaro has used his keen realistic power merely as a scaffolding, and has proceeded to build up on it a work that goes over almost into the region of symbolism. In the slender delicacy of this figure, the splendid black of her elaborate coiffure, the drooping fragility of her body, the sensuous grace and refinement, the languor and exhaustion--in all these speak the super-sensible gropings and hungers of Utamaro himself. Out of a living woman he created his disturbing symbol of the impossible desires that are no less subtle or painful because they are born of the flesh. With nerves keyed beyond the healthy pitch, he dreamed this melody whose strange minor chords alone could stir the satiated spirit. He caught and idealized the lines and colours of mortal weariness.

Size 13 × 8. Signed _Utamaro, hitsu_.

_Plate 40._]

"Woman," says Von Seidlitz, "had always played a prominent part in the popular art of the country, but now Utamaro placed one type of the sex in the absolute centre of all attention--the type, namely, of the courtesan initiated into all the refinements of mental culture as well as of bodily enchantment, and then playing in the life of Japan such a part as she must have played in Hellas during the golden age of Greek civilization. For expressing the inexpressible, the simple rendering of nature did not suffice; the figures must needs be lengthened to give the impression of supernatural beings; they must have a pliancy enabling them to express vividly the tenderest as well as the most intense emotions of the soul; lastly, they must be endowed with a wholly peculiar and therefore affected language for uttering the wholly peculiar sensations that filled them.... It is true that soon after he yielded to the general tendency of his age ... and gradually insisted on these attributes to exaggeration, even to impossibility, while his fame of having been the first to give such morbid inclinations completely satisfactory and therefore unsurpassable expression is a title of somewhat doubtful value, even if in any case a high historical significance cannot be denied it. Nevertheless, we must not forget that within this domain of the hyper-æsthetic Utamaro was the creator of a most original and individual style. Nay, if we could only admit the morbid and exaggerated to be as fit subject-matter for art as the healthy and sane, we must grant that this style is one of altogether enchanting originality, and that, however dangerous might be its immediate influence upon the spectator, and particularly upon possible successors, it does none the less lift us beyond the cramping limits of reality, and is therefore not wanting in idealism of a kind."

But weary as seems the spiritual content of these end-of-the-century designs of Utamaro's, there is no lack of brilliant vigour in their composition. The great triptychs--such as the "Night Festival on the Banks of the Sumida River," or the "Firefly Catchers," or the "Persimmon Pickers"--stand among the finest prints we know. In colour, rhythm of line, and dramatic quality of composition they are triumphs. There is a startling beauty in even those extraordinary bust-portraits in which the enormous coiffure, minute neck, slips of eyes, and dot of a mouth, carry exaggeration to a bizarre and delirious extreme.

Not long after 1800 the pressure of work brought upon him by his great popularity, together with the effects of a none too well spent life in the Yoshiwara, combined to strain his powers unduly. His work no longer kept its earlier freshness; his exaggerations became coarser; his invention grew less fertile. He began to rely on the assistance of his pupils, as we know from his "Book of the Green Houses" (1804), in which several collaborated with him. Doubtless many an Utamaro print of this time is their work.

In the year 1804 came the final catastrophe. Consequent upon the publication of the well-known triptych representing the ancient Shogun Hideyoshi entertaining his five concubines in the eastern quarter of the capital, the ruling Shogun Iyenari took umbrage at the salacious disrespect to his ancestor and the delicately implied allusion to himself, and Utamaro was thrown into prison for his offence. There he remained, it is said, for a year; when he emerged, it was with impaired health and a broken spirit.

Left-hand sheet of a triptych. Size 15 × 10. Signed _Utamaro, hitsu_.

_Plate 41._]

His productions after this time were not comparable with his earlier work. In the year 1806 he died, and with him died the great days of the Japanese print.

In this rapid survey it has been impossible to do justice to the many-sided powers of this great designer. His beautiful landscapes, his fine animal pictures, the tender and whimsical mother-and-child and domestic scenes he produced, have all had to be ignored in favour of his central achievements--his unparalleled designs of the courtesan of the Yoshiwara in her weary glory. Certainly no more varied and distinguished talent than his illumines the roll of Ukioye artists. Beside his perpetually fresh invention even the great Kiyonaga seems stereotyped and academic.

To-day the poorer examples of Utamaro's work are still readily procurable. His greatest works are rare. Certain of his triptychs, his silver half-length portraits, and his large heads on mica backgrounds, are very uncommon. But with patience and judgment the collector may still obtain now and then a fine specimen of Utamaro's work.

But some care is necessary. Even during Utamaro's life his work was forged by unscrupulous persons who hoped to reap the benefit of his popularity; and his pupils, under his direction, produced an unknown quantity of work signed with his name. After his death, from about 1808 to 1820, the Second Utamaro worked in the manner of his predecessor, issuing work that cannot with certainty be distinguished from the late work of the master. Besides these perils there is the fact that Utamaro's prints have been well reproduced in recent years; and reproductions are sometimes put forward as originals by ignorant or dishonest dealers. Considerable familiarity with authentic examples of Utamaro's best work, or expert advice, can alone protect the would-be purchaser.

PUPILS AND FOLLOWERS OF UTAMARO.

Though Utamaro's influence upon his contemporaries was incalculably great, he left behind him a body of pupils who were almost without exception rather insignificant artists. With cruder colour and composition, they carried still farther the vulgarities of Utamaro's declining period. Among them may be mentioned the following men:--

UTAMARO II, whose original name was Koikawa Shuncho or Harumachi, was a pupil of Sekiyen; he married Utamaro's widow, and from about 1808 to 1820 continued to produce prints in the debased Utamaro manner. Dr. Kurth believes he must be distinguished from another Koikawa Shuncho whose family name was Kurahashi, and who died in 1789. The whole matter is by no means clear.

BANKI and SHIKIMARO were among the best of this group. Particularly the former, before Utamaro's death, produced some fine work.

TAMAGAWA SHUCHO was a rare pupil of Utamaro who worked about 1790 to 1810.

KIKUMARO I (who also called himself KITAGAWA TSUKIMARO), KIKUMARO II, TANIMOTO TSUKIMARO, TAKEMARO, TOYOMARO, YUKIMARO I, YUKIMARO II, YOSHIMARO I (also called KITAO SHIGEMASA III), YOSHIMARO II, REKESENTI SOGAKU, GOSHICHI, HIDEMARO, MITEMARO, MINEMARO, KITAMARO, MICHIMARO, TOSHIMARO, HANAMARO, ISOMARO, ASHIMARO, KANAMARO, KUNIMARO, YOSHIMUNE, YOSHITORA, YOSHITSUYA, YOSHIKI, YOSHIMORI, YOSHITOSHI, YOSHIKATA, YENCHO, YUMIAKI, HOKOKUJIN FUYO, CHIKANOBU, SHINTOKU, SHUNKIOSAI, HISANOBU, SORAKU, SENKA, RYUKOKU, SEKKYO, SEKICHO, SEKIHO, SEKIJO may all be classed as late followers, fellow-pupils, or rivals of Utamaro.

BUNRO, some of whose work is fine, was a rare imitator of Utamaro. He worked chiefly about 1800 to 1810.

SHARAKU.

_Dramatic Portrait._

Whence art thou come,
Tall figure clasping to thy tragic breast
Thy orange robe, a flame amid the gloom--
By what wild doom
Art thou forever onward--onward pressed?

A wreath is on thy brow,
A crown of leafage from some lonely haunt
Where might Medea's shade brood ministrant.
Thy shoulders bow
Beneath what fearful weight, what need, what vow?

A leopard fierce--
A ghost that wanders down the wandering wind--
A fury tracking toward some shaken mind--
Where shall I find
The divination that thy veil shall pierce?

How shall I wrest
From thee the secret of thy lofty doom--
From what wild gulf of midnight thou dost come
Who, with clutched breast,
Stalkest forever onward--onward pressed?

Few people approach Sharaku's work for the first time without regarding him as a repulsive charlatan, the creator of perversely and senselessly ugly portraits whose cross-eyes, impossible mouths, and snaky gestures have not the slightest claim to be called art. At first these strange pictures may even seem mirth-provoking to the spectator--a view of them which he will remember in later years with almost incredulous wonder. To overcome one's original feeling of repulsion may take a long time; but to every serious student of Japanese prints there comes at last a day when he sees these portraits with different eyes; and suddenly the consciousness is born in him that Sharaku stands on the highest level of genius, in a greatness unique, sublime, and appalling.

Toshiusai Sharaku is a figure more shadowy than most, even in this region of shadows. The wilful neglect of a public that hated him has folded him in a mystery deeper than the mere accidental obscurations of time. Of his birth and death we know absolutely nothing, nor of the name of his teacher, if he had one. The resemblance between his work and that of Shunyei cannot be fully explained until we know more accurately their relative dates. Kiyonaga's noble drawing certainly affected his style. The influence of Shunsho upon his colour-schemes is fairly obvious; but we do not know whether this was due to personal contact, or only to familiarity with Shunsho's work. The one indisputable fact about Sharaku is that he was originally a Nō-performer in the troupe of the Daimyo of Awa. The Japanese authorities state that he worked at print-designing only one or two years, somewhere between 1790 and 1795. Dr. Kurth, in his stimulating but somewhat too imaginative volume, "Sharaku," believes that the evidence justifies us in fixing Sharaku's working period as a much longer time--1787 to 1795; but he cannot be said to have wholly proved his case. Whether or not these dates are accurate, we may at least say that Sharaku's years of activity lay chiefly within the early part of the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Silver background. Size 14 × 10. Signed _Toshiusai Shakaru ga_. Spaulding Collection.

_Plate 42._]

Sharaku's work consisted entirely of startlingly powerful and ironic portraits of actors, some in the form of large bust-portraits, some in the form of full-length figures of _hoso-ye_ size, and a few large sheets each containing two full-length figures. Their savage intensity is arresting and unforgettable; it at once drives one to consider what manner of man could have created them.

Sharaku was, as we have said, professionally a member of the Nō-troupe of the Daimyo of Awa. This fact is of far-reaching significance.

The Nō was a highly developed and aristocratic form of lyrical drama, based upon ancient and classical legends; it was full of a poetry and allusiveness that made it incomprehensible to the populace, who, indeed, had no opportunity to see it; it was as much the exclusive concern of the cultured aristocracy as the private revival of a Greek tragedy is with us to-day. In brocaded costumes, perhaps the treasured reliques of centuries ago, the Nō-dancer appeared upon his empty stage before a hushed audience of nobles--his face masked, as were the faces of the Greek actors, his voice lifted to an unnatural pitch of vibrant chaunting; and with stately motions, elaborately devised steps, and stereotyped gestures, he intoned the rolling strophes of the drama's long and hallowed strain. A complex formalism pervaded every word and step; in no art-form with which I am familiar is an accepted convention, a totally unrealistic medium, so rigidly adhered to as in these Nō-plays.

The Nō-actors were a caste utterly apart from the actors of the common stage. They were the protégés and associates of great nobles who would not, save incognito, appear in the presence of the common actor. The gap between the two classes of actors was as great as that between Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson and a juggler at a fair--one, the inheritor of a distinguished literary tradition, the interpreter of our classic dramatic heritage; the other, a crude beguiler of the populace, with station no higher than the pedlar. Caste-feeling may very well have been rather harsh between the haughty Nō-performers and their despised and ostracized brothers of the gutter.

As we have noted, the Nō-dancer wore a mask; these masks are creations of the greatest interest. They are carved out of wood, frequently with a skill that makes them striking works of art. It is impossible to convey in words the remarkable degree of characterization which they express. The smooth guilelessness of the young girl, the deep wrinkles of the old man, the leer of the rascal, the savagery of the villain, are all in their turn summarized in these haunting representations whose simplicity of outline is matched only by their intensity of effect. Nature seems to speak in them--but a heightened nature, stripped of all incidentals; the very essence of the character of the rôle is revealed to our eyes the instant the actor, wearing his impressive and vivid mask, steps upon the stage.

Bearing these things in mind, we may follow Dr. Kurth ("Sharaku," München, 1910) in his imaginative summary of the probable effects of the calling of a Nō-dancer upon the mind and art of Sharaku:--

"Picture a richly endowed painter--at first only dimly conscious of his powers--as in a mystery-play he treads the consecrated stage in the sacred precincts of a temple of Tokushima or in the shadow of the cryptomerias and firs of the Hachisuka castle--a fantastic mask covering his features, other masked spectres before his eyes--surrounded by the atmosphere of the occult tradition of ancient and lofty dramatic art--while, in the depths of his soul's abysses, chained Titans would storm up to the outer world, and confused pictures of his future creations hover before his spirit, ... and we shall realize that this man, as a painter, must become a dramaturgist.

"And if we summon to our vision the gorgeous stretches of Awa--its chasmy mountains with the forests rustling around them--its picturesque sea-lapped beaches--its sun-drenched groves of oak--its glowing scarlet maples--the brilliant flowers of its Spring--the evergreens of its Winter--then we shall realize that this man, as a painter, must become a colour-dreamer.

"Brooding spirit that he was, he, an Edipus, approached venturously to the Sphinx of passion that peers forth from the faces of men. Uncanny powers lurked in the grotesque furrows and demoniac grimaces of his Nō-masks, but nothing little or shallow--nay, in spite of all grotesqueness, only the significant and symbolic. And then he looked down from his buskined height upon the popular actors--bombastic barn-stormers--greasy low-comedians--louts from nowhere, as the illustrious Harunobu had called them--performers who brought before their gaping audience not, as did he, august things in strangely wonderful guise, but often things far too human in strutting stage-pomp. He looked upon them, a guild not only despised but sometimes even outlawed--a guild that stood on the same plane as the idiotic profession of the wrestler,--a class whose vulgar faces could not hide their swaggering gutter-vanity and their cringing lust for applause behind even the red paint of the ferocious warrior-rôle or the corpse-coloured rice-powder used when aping women. And if we see him thus, we shall understand that this man, as a painter of actors, must eventually become a pitiless satirist."

It was therefore with the colossal and tragic gestures of the Nō-dance in his soul, the distorted and monumental intensity of the Nō-masks in his eyes, and the contempt and irony of the Nō-performer for the common actor in his heart, that Sharaku, coming to Yedo, took up his terrible brush to depict the Yedo actors as he saw them. The resulting series of portraits is surely one of the supreme examples of graphic characterization and devastating contempt that the world has ever seen.

In the earlier portion of Sharaku's work, among which are his large portraits on yellow backgrounds, the originality of the man is already striking enough; but his acid qualities are hardly at their fullest development. Certain of his _hoso-ye_ prints must belong to this first period; in these, after the manner of Shunsho, he devoted his attention chiefly to the attaining of a powerful dramatic rendering of the rôle he was depicting. Strutting Daimyo, beguiling woman, ferocious warrior, shrewd peasant--he made each part move with the vigour and force of the seen stage. Shunsho was never more impressive; and here, in addition, there is in every design a strange distortion of line, a disturbing abnormality of pose, that makes one realize that no mere copyist of Shunsho is at hand.

Then, beginning with an astounding series of twenty-four portraits with mica backgrounds (Plates 42, 43, 44) representing actors in the play of the Forty-seven Ronin, Sharaku's mood changes. He ceases to remind one at all of Shunsho; it is rather the scrutinizing individual characterization of Shunyei that he recalls. But Shunyei never reached the point to which Sharaku is now coming. The dramatic force, the histrionic illusion of his pictures abates no jot; but beyond it, disturbing lights and movements are lurking. The mighty rôle towers like a shadow before us in its full dramatic sweep; but from the depths of the shadow peers with stealthy glance the indwelling personality of the actor--like a jackal's eyes seen suddenly in a king's tomb. This contradiction--this complex of two utterly antagonistic forces--is one of the miracles of Sharaku's genius: it is an antinomy which he resolves sufficiently to produce an equilibrium, but not enough to take from these portraits the insoluble mystery of two spirits, the tangle of two meanings, the explosive and inscrutable life that makes them unforgettable.

Thus the sweeping rhetoric of the stately rôle and the sudden naturalistic cry of the discovered actor's soul meet in a discord unique, subtly calculated, magnificent, and harrowing. Sharaku pierced deep into the hearts of his sitters to grasp the weak, the grotesque, the pathetic, the tragic; he appraised the lust, the horror, the vacuity that was there, and these qualities he dragged out to the light through the avenues by which he had entered--through the eyes, the lips, the hands--tearing these gates into terrible and distorted breaches eloquent of the booty that had been forced through them. No portraits so blasting as his have ever been created by another; no other hand has so devastatingly shattered the conventional contours of faces to reshape them into the awful images of their own hidden potentialities.

Size 14 × 10. Silver background. Signed _Toshiusai Sharaku ga_.

_Plate 43._]