artists and creators of separate styles: Harunobu, succeeded by
Koriusai, taking for motive the subjects of Shunsui; Shunsho of
Katsukawa (changed by Shunsui from its former title of Miyagawa),
upon whose shoulders had fallen the mantle of the Torii; Shigemasa,
working upon Shunsho’s lines, but breaking into a rival academy, the
Kitao; Toyoharu, pupil of old Torii Toyonobu, founder of the school of
Utagawa, whose most illustrious pupil was Toyokuni, the doll-maker,
and brother of Toyohiro, Hiroshige’s master. (Kunisada, noted for his
backgrounds, succeeded Toyokuni, and after the death of his master
signed himself Toyokuni the Second.)
Shunsho is considered one of the greatest artists of Japan, both as
an inventor and powerful colourist. M. Louis Gonse says: “All the
collections of coloured prints which are today the delight of the
tea-houses; all the fine compositions showing magnificent landscapes
and sumptuous interiors; all those figures of actors with heroic
gestures and impassive faces behind the grinning masks, and with
costumes striking and superb,—came originally from the atelier of
Katsukawa Shunsho, who had for a time the monopoly of them.” While
the Torii artists were beguiling the Yedo populace with theatrical
portraiture, and aiding the growing tendency toward cosmopolitanism
by issuing printed albums, books of travel and encyclopedias, art was
also expanding at the ancient capital, Kyoto. Sukenobu, the prolific
artist, was bringing out beautifully illustrated books, and Okio,
from sketching on the earth with bamboo sticks, while following his
father and mother to their work in the fields, had risen to be the
great founder of the Maruyama school of painting, and the Shijo or
naturalistic school was named from the street in which was the studio
of the master.
The Popular School, aided by Okio, effected a revolution in the laws
of painting at Kyoto, for the Torii artists forsook their academic
methods, painting birds, flowers, grass, quadrupeds, insects and fishes
from nature. Okio’s name ranks high among the great masters of Japanese
art, of whom so many fanciful legends are told. The charming artist
with brush and pen, John La Farge, says: “As the fruit painted by the
Greek deceived the birds, and the curtain painted by the Greek painter
deceived his fellow-artist, so the horses of Kanaoka have escaped
from their kakemonos, and the tigers sculptured in the lattices of
temples have been known to descend at night and rend one another in the
courtyards.”
Then the story is told of a moonlight picture, which, when unrolled,
filled a dark room with light. A pretty legend of Tanyu, the great Kano
artist, and the crabs at Enryaku Temple, is given by Adachi Kinnotsuke.
Upon one panel of the _fusuma_, or paper screen, is seen a crab,
marvellously realistic, only with claws invisible. On the other panels
the artist had painted its companions, and at the bidding of his patron
furnished them with claws. “Nevertheless,” the master declared, “I warn
you that if I give these crabs claws they will surely crawl out of the
picture.” As the visitor glances from the wonderful counterfeit crab
to the four empty panels beside it, he knows the old master had only
spoken the truth.
[Illustration: Under the Cherry Blooms. By Kiyonaga, the regenerator
of Torii, whose classic figures recall, in their dignity and
simplicity, the methods of the early Italian master.]
And so with Okio. He breathed into his pictures the breath of life.
His animals live, and his flights of storks swoop across the great
kakemonos, each bird with an individuality of its own, though one of a
multitude of flying companions. To view Okio aright, we should see him
at home in his own environment, not in Europe, where so many copies of
his masterpieces abound. John La Farge gives us a glimpse of an Okio,
fitly set, framed in oriental magnificence, in the Temple of Iyemitsu
at Nikko: “All within was quiet, in a golden splendour. Through the
small openings of the black and gold gratings a faint light from below
left all the golden interior in a summer shade, within which glittered
on golden tables the golden utensils of the Buddhist ceremonial. The
narrow passage makes the center, through whose returning walls project,
in a curious refinement of invention, the golden eaves of the inner
building beyond. Gratings, which were carved, and gilded trellises of
exquisite design, gave a cool, uncertain light. An exquisite feeling of
gentle solemnity filled the place. In the corridor facing the mountain
and the tomb, a picture hangs on the wall. It is by Okio. Kuwannon, the
Compassionate, sits in contemplation beside the descending stream of
life.”
About 1775 arose a legitimate successor to the school of Torii in
the adopted son of Kiyomitsu, Kiyonaga. He discarded the theatrical
tradition of his school, but the boldness of his drawing was foreign to
the style of Harunobu. “His brush had a superhuman power and swing.”
He rivalled the three great masters, Koriusai, Shigemasa, founder of
Kitao, and Toyoharu of Utagawa, and the masters of Ukiyo-ye, forsaking
their individual predilections, flocked to his studio.
The simplicity and dignity of the early Italian masters, sought after
and adored by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, their noble lines and
contours, are again realized in the panels of Kiyonaga. Professor
Fenollosa said that “classic” is the instinctive term to apply to
Kiyonaga, and that his figures at their best may be placed side by side
with Greek vase painting. Ideally beautiful is the fall of his drapery,
determining the lines of the figure in the fewest possible folds. In
indoor scenes he almost rivalled Harunobu, but he loved best to paint
in the open air. In imagination we see Kiyonaga, the lover of beauty,
gazing at the wealth of lotus blooms which fill the moats of feudal
Yedo, and in the crucible of his fancy transmuting them into the forms
of women. The lotus, of all flowers, has the deepest art significance,
and is the oldest motive. The author of “Greek Lines,” Henry Van
Brunt, said: “The lotus perpetually occurs in oriental mythology as
the sublime and hallowed symbol of the productive power of nature. The
Hindu and the Egyptian instinctively elevated it to the highest and
most cherished place in their Pantheons.”
It is the flower of religion, of beauty, and of love. From the ocean
the Hindu Aphrodite, Lachsmi, ascended. Isis in Egypt reigned, crowned
by the lotus, and there the tender, flowing lines became sublime,
monumental, fitted to symbolize death and eternal repose. In Japan its
joyous curves represent life, immortality, and, delicately sensuous,
they conjure up visions of ideal beauty. The lotus, sweetly blooming
before the artist’s eye, expanded into a vision of fair women, whose
lissom forms he clothed with swirls of drapery. And the women of Japan,
enamoured of these enchanting poses, endeavoured to assume the curves
of Kiyonaga, sheathing their delicate limbs in silken draperies, and
simulating in their enchanting slenderness the stems of flowers—or,
to borrow a beautiful simile from Lafcadio Hearn, “looking like a
beautiful silver moth robed in the folding of its own wings.”
It is said that every Japanese actor-print was a potential poster, and,
alas! the fashion-plate is endeavouring to mold itself upon the most
exaggerated type of the degenerate offspring of the genius of the Torii
School.
The Japanese woman, with her untrammelled form arrayed in draperies
designed by consummate artists, may dare to follow classic
Kiyonaga—youth and grace may acquire oriental plasticity. But let
fashion rest there. Pitiful and ludicrously futile is the effort of
embonpoint to attain sinuosity. Lines of beauty cannot be manufactured;
as well imagine the slender stem of the lotus encircled in steel, its
curves determined by a multiplicity of wires and tapes.
Although the leaders of Ukiyo-ye followed so closely in the footsteps
of Kiyonaga that his type of face stamps the years from 1780 to 1790,
yet his style was too classic, too noble to suit the taste of the Yedo
populace, which, in its thirst for realism, had become depraved. Rather
than lower his standard he chose to resign, leaving the field to his
followers, Yeishi, Utamaro and Toyokuni. These masters, at first as
dignified in their method as Kiyonaga, now yielded to the public craze
for the exaggerated, the abnormal and grotesque. It was an apotheosis
of ugliness and vulgarity, a “Zolaism in prints.”
Coarse pictures of actors, masquerading in female dress, replaced the
charming little domestic women of Harunobu and Koriusai,—the ladies of
Japan, as we see them in reality,—and the noble figures of Kiyonaga.
Gigantic courtesans, bizarre and fantastic, with delirious headgear,
took the place of Shunsho’s fair children of the “Underworld,” who, in
the modesty of their mien, seemed to belie the calling they so often
deplored, as the songs of the Yoshiwara testify, plaintively sung to
the syncopated rhythm of the samisen, tinkling through the summer
nights.
The school of Ukiyo-ye was sinking into obscurity, when Hiroshige
and Hokusai appeared, two children of light, dispersing the gloom:
Hiroshige, the versatile painter, lover of landscape and ethereal
artist of snow and mist; Hokusai, the prophet, and regenerator of
Ukiyo-ye. He was the artisan-artist, in the land which recognizes no
inferior arts, and the Mang-wa, consisting of studies as spontaneously
thrown off as those in the sketch-book Giorgione carried in his girdle,
was published for the use of workmen. Living in simplicity and poverty
he gave his life to the people, and the impression of his genius is
stamped upon their work. A true handicraftsman was Hokusai,—the Mang-wa
a dictionary of the arts and crafts, as well as the inspired vehicle
of art. In it “balance, rhythm and harmony, the modes in which Beauty
is revealed, both in nature and art,” were manifested,—for he was a
vital artist, laying bare the enigma of evolution, and the mystery of
creation.
[Illustration: The Actor Kikugoro. By Toyokuni I, the great
Actor-Designer and Master of Mimetic Art.]
Utamaro.
Le Fondateur de L’École de la Vie.
The above title is quoted from the work of M. Edmond de Goncourt, “as
one having authority,” there being many claimants to the leadership of
Ukiyo-ye (the floating world), the Popular School of Japanese Art. In
the life of Utamaro, M. de Goncourt, in exquisite language and with
analytical skill, has interpreted for us the meaning of that form of
Japanese art which found its chief expression in the use of the wooden
block for colour-printing, and to glance appreciatively at the work of
both artist and author is the motive of this sketch.
The Ukiyo-ye print, despised by the haughty Japanese aristocracy,
became the vehicle of art for the common people of Japan, and the
names of the artists who aided in its development are familiarly
quoted in every studio, whilst the classic painters of “Tosa” and
“Kano” are comparatively rarely mentioned. The consensus of opinion
in Japan during the lifetime of Utamaro agrees with the verdict of
M. de Goncourt. No artist was more popular. His atelier was besieged
by editors giving orders, and in the country his works were eagerly
sought after, when those of his famous contemporary, Toyokuni, were but
little known. In the “Barque of Utamaro,” a famous surimono, the title
of which forms a pretty play upon words, _maro_ being the Japanese
for vessel, the seal of supremacy is set upon the artist. Here he is
represented as holding court in a gaily decorated barge, surrounded by
a bevy of beauty paying homage to his genius. He was essentially the
painter of women, and though M. de Goncourt sets forth his astonishing
versatility, he yet entitles his work, “Outamaro, le Peintre des
Maisons Vertes.”
The beautiful inhabitants of these celebrated houses of the Yoshiwara
(the flower quarter) of Yedo had ever been sought as models by
the artists of Ukiyo-ye. But, alas! the sensuous poetic-artistic
temperament of Utamaro, undisciplined and uncontrolled, led to his
undoing. The pleasure-loving artist, recognizing no creed but the
worship of beauty, refusing to be bound by any fetters but those of
fancy, fell at last into the lowest depths of degradation, physical
and moral. And this debasement of their leader, tainting his art, was
reflected in the work of his brother artists and hastened the decadence
of the Popular School.
To understand the influences which sapped the self-control of the
gay and beauty-loving Utamaro, we have only to glance at the text by
Jipensha Ikkou of “The Annuary of the Green Houses,” two volumes of
prints in colour, so marvellously beautiful that they caused the artist
to be recognized as, in a sense, the official painter of the Yoshiwara.
The writer thus sums up the fatal fascination of the inmates, the
courtesans of highest rank, who alone were depicted by Utamaro. “The
daughters of the Yoshiwara are brought up like princesses. From
infancy they are given the most finished education” (from the Japanese
standpoint, be it observed). “They are taught reading, writing, art,
music, _le thé_, _le parfum_” (in the game of scents, the art is to
guess by inhaling the odour of burning perfumes the secret of their
composition). “Their entourage is that of princesses, brought up in the
seclusion of the palace. Coming from all parts of the ‘Land of the
Rising Sun,’ they must discard their individual patois and learn to
speak the archaic tongue, slightly modified, the poetical, the noble
language of the court from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.”
In the home of the celebrated Tsutaya Juzabro, who edited the most
beautiful books of the time, in his early impressionable youth
lived Utamaro, within a stone’s throw of the great gate leading
to the Yoshiwara. By day he devoted himself to his art, by night
he surrendered himself to the fatal enchantment of that brilliant
“Underworld,” until, like Merlin, ensnared by Vivian, with the charm of
“woven paces and waving hands,” his art sapped by excesses, he became
“lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.”
Let us, forgetting this sad sequel, glance at the works which testify
to the life of high artistic endeavour led by Utamaro in the early part
of his career. In the preface to the “Yehon Moushi Yerabi” (Chosen
Insects), the master of Utamaro, Toriyama Sekiyen, throws so charming
a sidelight upon the youth of the artist, that the temptation to quote
is irresistible. The value of these Japanese prefaces to the world, to
workers in every field, is incalculable. At the outset of his work, M.
de Goncourt alludes to the well-known preface of Hokusai in the “Fugaku
Hiak’kei,” and doubtless fortified himself by the stimulating example
of the old master, when undertaking at the age of seventy the great
task of presenting to the Western world, under the title of “L’Art
Japonais,” a history of five noted painters, besides that of other
artists in bronze and lacquer, pottery and iron—artists in a land where
the terms artist and artisan are interchangeable, the only country
where art industrial almost always touches grand art.
The translator of the preface of Sekiyen is gratefully referred to by
M. de Goncourt as “l’intelligent, le savant, l’aimable M. Hyashi.” It
may be considered a revolutionary manifesto of the Profane School,
the school of real life, in opposition to the hierarchical Buddhist
academies of Kano and Tosa, which had become stultified by tradition
and stifled by conventional observances.
“Préface écrite par Toriyama Sekiyen, le maître d’Outamaro, célébrant
le naturisme (sorti du cœur) de son petit, de son cher élève Outa.”
“Reproduire la vie par le cœur, et en dessiner la structure au pinceau,
est la loi de la peinture. L’étude que vient de publier maintenant,
mon élève Outamaro, reproduit la vie même du monde des insectes. C’est
la vraie peinture du cœur. Et quand je me souviens d’autrefois, je me
rappelle que dès l’enfance, le petit Outa, observait le plus infini
détail des choses. Ainsi à l’automne, quand il était dans le jardin,
il se mettait en chasse des insectes, et que ce soit un criquet où une
sauterelle, avait-il fait une prise, il gardait la bestiole dans sa
main et s’amusait à l’étudier. Et combien de fois je l’ai grondé dans
l’appréhension qu’il ne prenne l’habitude, de donner la mort à des
êtres vivants. Maintenant qu’il a acquis son grand talent du pinceau,
il fait de ces études d’insectes, la gloire de sa profession.”
The enthusiastic master of _le petit Outa_ proceeds to rhapsodize upon
his pupil’s genius and intimate knowledge of the structure of insects.
“He makes us hear,” he says, “the shrilling of the tamamoushi,” the
cicada of Japan, whose endless peevish twanging upon one string forms
an underlying accompaniment to the harmonies of long summer days.
“He borrows the light weapons of the grasshopper for making war; he
exhibits the dexterity of the earthworm, boring the soil under the
foundations of old buildings; he penetrates the mysteries of nature in
the groping of the larvæ, in the lighting of his path by the glow-worm,
and he ends by disentangling the end of the thread of the spider’s web.”
The colour-printing of these insects is a miracle of art, says M. de
Goncourt, and there is nothing comparable to it in Europe. Of the
methods by which these colour prints are brought to such a height of
perfection, it is almost impossible to speak authoritatively. They are
the result of a threefold combination: of a paper marvellously prepared
from the bark of the shrub, _Kozo_, diluted with the milk of rice flour
and a gummy decoction extracted from the roots of the hydrangea and
hibiscus; of dyes, into the secret of whose alchemy no modern artist
can penetrate, it being safe to say the early “Tan-ye” and “Beni-ye”
prints can never be reproduced; of the application of those colours by
the master engraver’s fingers—that wizard hand of the Orient into whose
finger-tips are distilled the mysteries of bygone centuries. A portion
of the colour by means of this calculated pressure is drunk, absorbed
into the paper, and only the transparency is left vibrating upon the
fibres, like colour beneath the glaze.
The “Catalogue Raisonné” of M. de Goncourt is a prose masterpiece.
His descriptive touches, like pastels set in jewels, captivate the
imagination. Through him we see the albums, the fans, the kakemonos,
the surimonos. Oh, the prints, with their wondrous backgrounds, the
delight of Utamaro! Sometimes straw-yellow, the uniformity broken
with clouds of ground mica; sometimes gray in tint, like the traces
of receding waves upon the beach. Some silvered backgrounds throw
moonlight reflections upon the figures; some are sombre, bizarre—all
are marvellous beyond words. And the colours! we cannot define them in
English. The “bleus” (malades des mauves), the “rose” (beni) “si peu de
rose, qu’ils semblent s’apercevoir à travers un tulle; l’azur—délavé,
et comme noyé dans l’eau,”—not colours, but nuances, which recall the
colours. And the “Gauffrage,” so effective with the print artists, with
us a mere confectioner’s touch!
It is said that “the æsthetic temperament of a nation is most subtly
felt in the use of colour. Purity, coldness, sensuality, brightness,
dullness of tints, are significant terms correlated to mental and
physical human phenomena.” The assertion of Ruskin, that “the bodily
system is in a healthy state when we can see hues clearly in their
most delicate tints, and enjoy them, fully and simply, with the kind
of enjoyment children have in eating sweet things,” is brought to
mind in viewing the Japanese people upon the occasion of one of their
great flower fêtes, feasting their eyes upon cherry blooms or trailing
clusters of the wistaria.
[Illustration: While Mother Sleeps. By Utamaro, named by M. de
Goncourt: “Le Fondateur de L’École de la Vie.”]
Utamaro planned schemes of colour and devised harmonies—themes which,
improvised upon and endlessly imitated by his artist confrères, filled
his own countrymen with delight and ravished the hearts of Parisian
painters. The influence of Utamaro, Hiroshige and the other masters
of Ukiyo-ye revolutionized the colour-sense of the art world, so that
Theodore Child, writing in 1892, remarks of the Japanese influence:
“The Paris Salon of today as compared with the salon of ten years ago
is like a May morning compared with a dark November day.”
The same keen observation and technical skill which would have made
Utamaro a famous naturalist is shown in his marvellous studies
of women. He was the first Japanese artist who deviated from the
traditional manner of treating the face. The academic style demanded
the nose to be suggested by one calligraphic, aquiline stroke, the eyes
to be mere slits, the mouth the curled up petal of a flower. Utamaro
blent with this convention, so little human, a mutinous grace, a
spiritual comprehension; he kept the consecrated lines, but made them
approach the human. These “effigies of women” became individuals; in
one word, he is an idealist, he “makes a goddess out of a courtesan.”
No detail of her anatomy escapes his eye, no grace of line or beauty
of contour. M. de Goncourt, in detailing the great prints of Utamaro,
transports us to the Orient. He unrolls the film of memory, so that
again the Japanese woman stands, reclines, and lives before us.
“Vous avez la Japonaise en tous les mouvements intimes de son corps;
vous l’avez, dans ses appuiements de tête, sur le dos de sa main, quand
elle réfléchit, dans ses agenouillements, les paumes de ses mains
appuyées sur les cuisses, quand elle écoute, dans sa parole, jetée de
côté, la tête un peu tournée, et qui la montre dans les aspects si
joliment fuyants d’un profil perdu; vous l’avez dans sa contemplation
amoureuse des fleurs qu’elle regarde aplatie à terre; vous l’avez
dans ses renversements où légèrement elle pose, à demi assise, sur la
balustrade d’un balcon; vous l’avez dans ses lectures, où elle lit
dans le volume, tout près de ses yeux, les deux coudes appuyés sur
ses genoux; vous l’avez dans sa toilette qu’elle fait avec une main
tenant devant elle, son petit miroir de métal, tandis que de l’autre
main passée derrière elle, elle se caresse distraitement la nuque
de son écran; vous l’avez dans le contournement de sa main autour
d’une coupe de saké, dans l’attouchement délicat et recroquevillé
de ses doigts de singe, autour des laques, des porcelaines, des
petits objets artistiques de son pays; vous l’avez enfin, la femme de
l’Empire-du-Lever-du-Soleil, en sa grace grâce languide, et son coquet
rampement sur les nattes du parquet.”
To translate is to travesty, for the French language seems to be the
only medium through which can be filtered the nuances of Japanese
thought, which elude the ordinary elements of language, like the
perfume of flowers, the bouquet of delicate vintages. Our blunt
Anglo-Saxon mars that picture language, where one flexible, curved
calligraphic stroke conveys to the æsthetically receptive oriental
imagination what stanzas of rhyming rhapsody fail to define. Sir Edwin
Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn approach the French, are, so to speak,
orientalized. Ordinary English fails to give a Japanese equivalent.
It is too emphatic, too objective; it suggests the dominant British
hobnail upon the delicate Tea-house tatami—that immaculate, beautiful
matting, into whose uniform lines embroidered draperies dissolve
deliciously. Oh, those dreams of dresses!—the warp and woof of the
visions of the masters of Ukiyo-ye, of Harunobu and Kiyonaga, Toyokuni
and Kunisada, and all the rest, the idols of Parisian colourists!