gave a scheme of seven colours. At this point (about 1760) Suzuki Harunobu appeared. By many connoisseurs he is counted the greatest master of nishiki-ye,[1] and the title rests on at least three solid foundations, namely, the delicacy of his line drawing, the delightful softness and music of his colours, and the atmosphere of fresh innocence with which he envelops his female figures. But Harunobu’s conceptions of life and its graces recall the declining day of Heian civilization, when “cloud gallants” painted their eyebrows, powdered their faces, and aped femininity. His work is never robust; his men are scarcely distinguishable from women; he deforms hands and feet to make them slender, and he knows only one type of female beauty which he produces and reproduces unceasingly. Nevertheless to him undoubtedly belongs the credit of having inaugurated a new and almost final departure in Japanese chromo-xylography. He abandoned the drawing of actors to which his contemporaries had hitherto confined themselves—a limitation which, in turn, confined their public to the lower middle classes, since the theatre and everything appertaining to it belonged essentially to vulgar life—, and he set himself to design chromo-xylographic pictures of ladies and gentlemen amid the luxuries of their lives and the refinements of their pastimes. Further, he included backgrounds in his scheme of colours; multiplied the number of blocks so as to produce a variety of tints, strong, light and soft; changed the shape of the paper, and added embossing, which greatly increased the representative capabilities of the art. From his time no marked advance was made. None, indeed, was possible. There was elaboration, but no important innovation. We now find a large school of brilliant artists, great in a pictorial as well as a decorative sense: Koriusai, Katsukawa Shunsho, Ippitsusai, Buncho, Katsukawa Shunyei, Utagawa Toyonobu, Utagawa Toyoharu, Kitao Shigemasa, Kubo Shunman, Torii Kiyonaga, Shuncho, Chobunsai, Yeishi, Kikugawa Utamaro, Utagawa Toyokuni, Hokusai, Hokkei and Hiroshige. They cover a space from 1750 to 1850, just a century. As to which of them deserves to be placed on the throne of chromo-xylographic art, there are differences of opinion, but the honour certainly belongs to one of these four, Utamaro, Kiyonaga, Harunobu and Koriusai. Some hold that everything culminated in Kiyonaga (1780–1795), that everything subsequent to him was a degeneration, and that everything good in contemporary or later art was due to his influence. But the longer one studies the chromo-xylographs of Japan and the wider one’s range of acquaintance with them, the more does Rikugawa Utamaro force himself into the first place in one’s affection and esteem, alike
- ↑ Literally “brocade picture,” but the term nishiki (brocade) had long been used in Japan in the sense simply of “many-coloured.” Another term originally applied to these pictures was suri-mono (print), but the name subsequently came to designate little single-sheet chromo-xylographs which were sent to friends at the New Year, and also black-and-white prints. Sheets in sequence—two, three, five, seven or even twelve—which were first introduced by Torii Kiyonaga in 1775, are called tsuzuki-mono. Of nearly contemporaneous origin was the hashira-kakushi-ye (post-concealing picture), a long narrow chromo-xylograph; and to Katsukawa Shunsho (1789) we owe the hoso-ye (slender picture), which often shows remarkably clever examples of designing.
