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Utamaro Was Shackled for Fifty Days for One Print of a Warlord
In the fifth month of 1804, officers of the Tokugawa shogunate arrested Kitagawa Utamaro, the most sought-after designer of women's portraits in Edo. His crime was a set of woodblock prints showing the sixteenth-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi at a cherry-blossom party with his wife and concubines, each one named beside her likeness, drawn from the popular chronicle Ehon Taikōki. Naming the Taikō, or any recent military ruler, in a commercial print was against the law. Utamaro was jailed for several days, then manacled at his own house for about fifty days, and his publishers were fined. He was in his early fifties, at the height of his reputation as the pre-eminent painter of bijin (pictures of beautiful women) in Japan. He died two years later, in 1806, and historians of ukiyo-e still debate how much those fifty days in chains had to do with it. The print that broke the law The prints that ended Utamaro's freedom, however briefly, were not shunga or courtesan studies, the material usually blamed for his censorship troubles. They showed Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537 to 1598), the warlord who unified Japan before the Tokugawa family took power, entertaining his wife and concubines at a spring outing to view cherry blossoms. The gathering, held at Daigo-ji temple in Kyoto in 1598 not long before Hideyoshi's death, was already familiar from popular history. Utamaro's source was the Ehon Taikōki, an illustrated chronicle of Hideyoshi's rise published between 1797 and 1802 and staged repeatedly as kabuki and jōruri between 1799 and 1804. Depicting named, identifiable military rulers, Hideyoshi above all, was forbidden under shogunate law. Hideyoshi's son and heir had been destroyed by the first Tokugawa shogun in 1615; a picture of the old warlord surrounded by named women, sold in the idiom of a Yoshiwara courtesan print, was not a comfortable subject for his successors to see in circulation. Utamaro was not alone in misjudging the risk. Kitagawa Tsukimaro, Utagawa Toyokuni, Katsukawa Shuntei, Katsukawa Shun'ei and the writer Jippensha Ikku were caught in the same case, along with their publishers. Utamaro, the best known of the group, was jailed for several days and then sentenced to about fifty days in manacles at his own house. The publishers paid heavy fines. Toyoaki becomes Utamaro Utamaro's origins are not well documented. He was born around 1753, and even his birthplace, variously given as Edo, Kyoto, Osaka and Kawagoe, is not settled. He trained under Toriyama Sekien, a Kanō-schooled painter turned ukiyo-e artist who taught him for years before his own death in 1788. Utamaro published minor book illustrations and actor prints from about 1775 under the name Kitagawa Toyoaki. At a banquet in 1782 he announced a new art name, Utamaro, the one he used for the rest of his career. By 1783 he had moved into the household of Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the Yoshiwara publisher who had built his business on guidebooks to the licensed quarter and was about to become the most important print publisher in Edo. Utamaro lived and worked under Tsutaya's roof for several years, alongside other talents the publisher had gathered, Kitao Masanobu among them. His earliest bijin prints followed the elegant, elongated figures that Torii Kiyonaga had made fashionable through the 1780s. Only in the early 1790s did Utamaro find a manner unmistakably his own, and it was Tsutaya who published it. The invention of the ōkubi-e What changed, around 1791, was distance. Instead of the full-length figure that Kiyonaga and his contemporaries favoured, Utamaro began cropping in: head and shoulders, or the figure from the waist up, set against a plain or mica-dusted ground with no interior and no furniture to place the woman anywhere in particular. Historians of the print call the format ōkubi-e (large-head pictures). Neither the close crop nor the coloured ground was new by itself, but Utamaro was the first to use them as a sustained programme rather than an occasional device. Kitagawa Utamaro, Naniwaya Okita, a Ryōgoku teahouse waitress he drew repeatedly, in a large-head bijin portrait. Metropolitan Museum of Art. The effect turned a decorative genre into something closer to characterisation. A face filling the sheet has to carry the print on its own. Utamaro gave his women narrowed or heavy-lidded eyes, private half-smiles, a downward tilt of the head that reads as thought rather than display. Three Beauties of the Present Day, published by Tsutaya around 1792 to 1793, arranges three real Edo women, the geisha Tomimoto Toyohina and the teahouse workers Naniwaya Kita and Takashima Hisa, in a tight triangular cluster of overlapping profiles. Naming ordinary women in prints was against the law, so each is identified instead by a family crest worked into her clothing or her fan. The mica ground behind them catches the light rather than describing a place. Mica, sumptuary law and Tsutaya's shop The shimmering backgrounds were made with kira, powdered mica, brushed onto paper so that the pigment caught the light like a dull metal. It was an expensive effect, several separate printings for one sheet, and it needed a publisher willing to pay for it. Tsutaya was that publisher. He had built his fortune on Yoshiwara guidebooks before moving into prints and illustrated books, and he understood the market for a luxury object sold as ephemera. Their partnership, from 1783 until Tsutaya's death in 1797, produced some of the finest printing of the period. It also operated under constant political risk. Between 1787 and 1793 the shogunate's chief councillor, Matsudaira Sadanobu, pushed through the Kansei Reforms, a programme of sumptuary regulation that reached into the publishing trade: restrictions on subject matter, on naming ordinary women, and eventually, in 1795, a ban on mica grounds themselves. Publishers who defied the rules risked fines or worse. Tsutaya had already lost half his assets in 1791, after the writer Santō Kyōden, whom he published, was sentenced to fifty days in manacles for three sharebon that broke the sumptuary code. Utamaro's mica-ground bijin were a luxury made inside a shrinking legal space, years before his own arrest showed how much further that space could close. Individual faces, not ideal types Utamaro's reputation rests on more than technique. Kiyonaga and his followers had painted an ideal, a type of beauty repeated from print to print. Utamaro increasingly painted particular women. Teahouse workers such as Naniwaya Okita and Takashima Ohisa appear again and again across his output, recognisable from sheet to sheet by more than a crest. He was interested in a woman's character and mood as much as her surface prettiness, in a sideways glance or a hand pressed against a cheek. The law made plain identification difficult. Naming ordinary women in a commercial print was forbidden, so Utamaro and his publishers found ways round it: a crest, a shop name folded into the design, and from around 1795 a run of prints that hid a beauty's name inside a visual puzzle. His range went beyond the Yoshiwara and its teahouses. He drew women diving for awabi shellfish, mothers with children and old women alongside the courtesans and geisha who made his name. Series such as Ten Types of Women's Physiognomy, published in the same years as Three Beauties, isolated one face and one mood at a time: absorption, in a young woman blowing into a glass noisemaker; vanity, in another checking her teeth in a mirror. The last two years Tsutaya Jūzaburō died in 1797. Utamaro kept working, prolifically: across his career he is credited with more than two thousand print designs, over a hundred series of bijin alone, illustrations for close to a hundred books and around thirty paintings, issued through nearly sixty different publishers. Even so, several historians of ukiyo-e judge that his most inventive decade closed with Tsutaya's shop. By the early 1800s the large-head format he had invented was everywhere, copied by rivals and by his own students, Tsukimaro and Kiyomine among them, and his own late series increasingly repeat earlier ideas rather than extend them. The Ehon Taikōki case, in 1804, landed on a fifty-one-year-old artist already past his best years. He served his sentence, fifty days manacled at home after a short jailing, and went back to print design, but not for long. He died in Edo on the twentieth day of the ninth month of 1806, aged fifty-three. Whether the manacles caused his decline in any medical sense is not something the record can settle. What the record shows is the timing: arrest in 1804, a diminished final period, death in 1806. Utamaro reaches Paris Japanese prints began reaching Europe in quantity after trade reopened in 1854, first as packing paper around export porcelain, then as a market in their own right. Utamaro's sheets were among the most sought after. Claude Monet owned more than thirty of them. Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and James McNeill Whistler all collected or studied his bijin. What drew them was the crop: a face or a gesture filling the sheet, with no perspective box or interior to place it in. The Paris shop La Porte Chinoise, a gathering point from the 1860s for painters curious about Japanese imports, did more to shape Impressionist and Post-Impressionist composition than its modest premises suggested. None of this was available to Utamaro. He worked for Edo publishers and Edo buyers, inside Edo law, and the same shogunate that could manacle him for fifty days over a print of a dead warlord had no mechanism for objecting to what happened when his sheets reached Montmartre. By the time Monet was buying them, the ōkubi-e format Utamaro had invented to sell portraits of teahouse waitresses was reshaping paintings the shogunate would never see and could never have licensed. Masters of Ukiyo-e What Is Ukiyo-e? Hokusai Hiroshige Utamaro Sharaku Kuniyoshi Yoshitoshi Ohara Koson
Along the River During Qingming, the Song Scroll of 800 People
In the early twelfth century, in the Northern Song capital of Bianjing (modern Kaifeng), a court painter finished a handscroll 25 centimetres high and about 5.25 metres long. Unrolled section by section, right to left, it shows the city and its river in one continuous view: open fields give way to suburbs, suburbs to a crowded bridge, the bridge to a gated wall and a market street beyond. A modern count puts the human population of the scene at 814, alongside dozens of boats, pack animals and buildings. The scroll carries no signature and no date. Both the painting's title and its attribution to the painter Zhang Zeduan come from a single note, written by the scholar Zhang Zhu in 1186 and mounted onto the scroll as a colophon, decades after the paint had dried. A painting this size, this old and this precisely populated would be remarkable if it merely survived. By modern count it shows 28 boats, 60 animals, about 170 trees and some 30 buildings, and, at its centre, one bridge that very nearly fails. That it survives at all, carrying this much information, makes it less a single image than a continuous record, made by someone who had clearly watched before he painted. An Unnamed Painter, Named Later Zhang Zhu's colophon is short. It states that the painter, Zhang Zeduan, was a native of Dongwu (present day Zhucheng, in Shandong). He studied as a young man, then travelled to the capital and took up painting, excelling at jiehua, ruled-line painting done with a straight edge rather than free brushwork: boats, carts, bridges, market streets, moats and city walls. Zhang Zhu cites an earlier catalogue, Mr Xiang's Evaluation of Pictures, which places two of the artist's works in the "divine class", the highest rank available. One was a Regatta on West Lake, not otherwise known today. The other, named only by title, fits this scroll better than anything else Zhang Zhu mentions. That is the entire biographical record. Later reference works give Zhang Zeduan dates, 1085 to 1145, and a post at the Hanlin Painting Academy under Emperor Huizong, but these rest on inference rather than on any surviving document. Much of what might have confirmed or corrected them was lost a few decades after the scroll was painted, when Jin dynasty armies overran Bianjing in 1127 and the Song court fled south. The painting may be a rare survivor of exactly the world it shows. Even the title is less settled than a museum label suggests. Zhang Zhu wrote his colophon on the day after the Qingming festival of 1186, which may be no more than an accident of timing, though it has encouraged readers who want Qingming to mean the spring festival of tomb sweeping rather than the alternative sense, peace and brightness, a stock phrase for good government. Scholars have argued for both readings, and for a deliberate double meaning. Zhang Zhu did not resolve the question; he simply supplied the title that later cataloguers kept. A Painting Built to Be Unrolled Along the River During the Qingming Festival is painted in ink and colour on silk, and it was never meant to hang on a wall. A handscroll is stored rolled up in a box and opened a stretch at a time on a table, read right to left the way Chinese text runs, and rolled closed again behind the viewer's hands as a new stretch opens ahead. There is no single vantage point from which the whole composition can be seen at once, not even now, when a photograph can flatten the whole 5.25 metres onto one screen. The route follows the river outward from open country. Willows and a train of pack animals appear first, then the outskirts of the city: inns and a boat under repair, farmers bringing produce in by cart. The pace quickens as the buildings close in, building toward the painting's acknowledged centre: a wooden bridge arcing over the water, thick with pedestrians, above a river crammed with boats. Past the bridge, the scroll runs through a city gate and along a street lined with shops and stalls, before the paint stops and the silk ends. Shops, Doctors and a Line of Camels What the scroll records is commerce, not ceremony. Restaurants advertise themselves with cloth banners and timber signboards. Wine shops, noodle stalls, a doctor's clinic and a fortune teller's table appear along the main street, each with customers and staff occupied in specific, legible tasks rather than posed for the painter. Porters carry loads on shoulder poles. Ox carts and handcarts compete with sedan chairs for road space, and a line of camels, heavy with cargo, files through one of the city gates, a reminder that Bianjing's markets were fed by overland trade as well as by the river. A camel train and carts pass through the timber city gate of Bianjing into the market street, a detail from the Song original scroll. The river itself was a working waterway before it became a subject for a court painter. The Bian canal linked Bianjing to the network that carried grain from the south to feed the capital, and the scroll shows the traffic that depended on it: barges being loaded and unloaded alongside a boatyard where rope and rigging are under repair. Zhang Zhu's colophon singles out boats and bridges as the artist's particular strength, and the density of nautical detail, different hull types, the way a mast is raised or struck, supports the idea that whoever painted this had watched real boats closely before drawing one. The Bridge That Nearly Failed The scroll's best-known passage is a single moment of near disaster. At the painting's midpoint, a wooden bridge without a single pier in the water arcs across the Bian river in a single span of about 20 metres, built from interlocking timbers pinned and wedged together rather than nailed, a technique sometimes called beam weaving. Contemporaries called it the Rainbow Bridge, Hongqiao, for its shape. In the painting, a large boat approaches with its mast still raised, seconds from striking the underside of the arch. Boatmen shout and haul at ropes. A man leans from the rail to pass down a line, while a crowd presses in along the bridge to watch. The bridge was real enough to rebuild. In 2000, the bridge scholar Tang Huancheng, working with a team from MIT for a television documentary, reconstructed a span using only the joinery visible in the painting: no nails, no piers, interlocking timbers carrying the load through friction and geometry alone. The finished bridge, built by hand in a Chinese village, held the weight of a water buffalo without strain. A nine-hundred-year-old painting had supplied a working engineering drawing. Why It Is Called China's Mona Lisa The comparison is a modern one, and it does not rest on shared subject matter or style. The Mona Lisa is a single face; the Qingming scroll is a crowd of 814 individually posed strangers. What the two paintings share is a fame that has outgrown ordinary art history: both are the one work most people can name from their tradition, and both draw crowds who queue for hours to see an object that photographs already show them in full. The Chinese comparison also carries a note the Louvre's painting does not. The scroll has been read for centuries as a document as much as a picture, cited by economic historians for shop layouts and by naval historians for hull design. Leonardo's picture keeps its secret (why does she smile) with total economy. Zhang Zeduan's scroll works by accumulation, 814 separate lives rather than one ambiguity, and its fame rests on being exhaustive rather than enigmatic. That is arguably the harder trick. The Qing Court's Version, Enlarged The original scroll was copied and reinvented throughout the rest of imperial history, each new version updating the fashions and architecture to its own period while keeping the title and the same journey from country to city. The most elaborate remake was finished in 1736, the first year of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, the work of five court painters: Chen Mei, Sun Hu, Jin Kun, Dai Hong and Cheng Zhidao. Their version runs to about 11.5 metres, more than double the length of the Song original, painted in stronger colour and finer, more even brushwork suited to Qing taste rather than Northern Song habit. This Qing court version now belongs to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, part of the imperial collection moved from Beijing during the Chinese civil war. It has been exhibited and reproduced more often than the fragile Song original, and for many visitors it is the version they meet first: more colourful and easier to photograph from end to end. A Painting Too Fragile to Show The Song original stays in Beijing, in the Palace Museum inside the Forbidden City, and it is shown rarely and briefly. Nearly a millennium of rolling and unrolling has left the silk fragile, and conservators limit its exposure to light and to the physical stress of display. When it has travelled (to Hong Kong in 2007, to Tokyo in 2012) queues formed for hours, and viewing time per visitor was cut to seconds on a moving walkway. For most people, in China and outside it, the scroll is known through reproduction: prints, screens, textbook plates, and now high-resolution scans that let a viewer do on screen what the silk itself can no longer safely do very often, unroll from end to end. The Same Dynasty, a Different Register It is worth setting this scroll against the other object the Northern Song is best known for among collectors: its ceramics. The celadon bowls and Ru ware of the same court, the same decades, pursue almost the opposite effect: plain surfaces and a single glaze, nothing added for the eye to read as a story. Zhang Zeduan's scroll is the crowded, noisy counterpart to that restraint, proof that the dynasty which prized a bowl for what it left out also produced a painter who left almost nothing out. Read side by side, the two traditions describe one court from opposite ends: the quiet of the kiln and the noise of the river. Art of China Along the River During Qingming Chinese Landscape Painting Art of China I: Neolithic Pottery & Jade Art of China II: Shang Bronzes Art of China III: Han Silk & Lacquer Art of China IV: Tang Gold & Silver Art of China V: Song Porcelain Art of China VI: Ming & Qing
Sharaku Made 150 Actor Prints in Ten Months, Then Vanished
In the fifth month of 1794, kabuki fans in Edo started seeing a name they had never encountered before: Tōshūsai Sharaku. Over the following ten months, ending in the first month of 1795, the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō issued somewhere around 140 to 150 print designs under that name, almost all of them portraits of kabuki actors, with a few sumo wrestlers and warriors included. Then the prints stopped, and Sharaku vanished. No later work bears his name, no contemporary diary mentions him, and his identity is still argued over today. The strongest candidate is a minor Noh actor called Saitō Jūrōbei. Ten Months, One Publisher, About 150 Prints Japanese lunar-calendar months do not map cleanly onto Western ones, so scholars date Sharaku's debut to the fifth month of Kansei 6, which ran from 29 May to 26 June 1794. His opening batch was twenty-eight ōkubi-e, or large-head bust portraits, in the ōban sheet size, tied to plays running that month at Edo's three licensed kabuki theatres: the Miyako-za, the Kiri-za and the Kawarazaki-za. All twenty-eight were printed against mica grounds, most of them dark grey or near-black, that made the actors' faces glint under lamplight. Every print in the Sharaku catalogue, without exception, was issued by one man: Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the leading print and book publisher in Edo. No rival publisher's name appears anywhere in his output. The catalogue itself is unusually short. Reference works list him simply as "Tōshūsai Sharaku, active 1794 to 1795" because that is all that can be proven: a working name attached to a run of prints between two fixed dates, nothing before and nothing after. Even the total is an estimate. Specialists have counted as few as 140 and as many as roughly 150 designs, depending on whether preparatory drawings and disputed sheets are included in the tally. Faces Built to Unsettle The twenty-eight ōkubi-e are what made Sharaku's name, and what still draw crowds to exhibitions of his work today. Take the actor Ōtani Oniji III, shown as the servant Edobei in the play Koi Nyōbō Somewake Tazuna, staged at the Kawarazaki-za. Sharaku crops in tight on the face: a jutting nose, a curled lip, fingers spread and hooked as the character gropes toward his victim. It is not a flattering picture. It is a picture of a man performing villainy, drawn by someone more interested in the psychology of the role than in the vanity of the actor playing it. Sharaku applied the same scrutiny to heroic roles, not just villainous ones. In a companion print from the same production, Ichikawa Ebizō appears as the samurai Takemura Sadanoshin in the moment before he takes his own life to preserve his honour, hands clenched, eyes strained under the weight of the decision. Earlier designers working in bust portraiture, Katsukawa Shunkō and Shun'ei among them, had stayed closer to flattering convention. Sharaku's contemporary Utamaro was doing something related in his portraits of women, reading mood and character rather than settling for prettiness, and Sharaku pushed that same instinct further, to the edge of caricature. Tōshūsai Sharaku, Ichikawa Ebizō as Takemura Sadanoshin, 1794. Printed from the same May 1794 production as the Edobei bust. A Falling Off, Batch by Batch After the ōkubi-e, Sharaku's output declined in stages that scholars still use to divide his career into four periods. A second batch of thirty-eight designs followed in the seventh and eighth months of 1794: thirty half-length portraits on plain yellow grounds in the narrow hosoban format, and eight pairs of actors kept on the white or dark mica grounds of the debut series. A third batch, in the eleventh month of 1794, moved into hosoban and the mid-sized aiban format and is generally judged weaker again. A fourth and final batch, fifteen hosoban prints from the first month of 1795, carries a different signature form from the rest and is the least admired of the four periods. Somewhere in this run Sharaku also produced two warrior prints and at least one sumo design, minor by count but proof that Tsutaya was still willing to try him in other genres before the commissions ended for good. Why the Prints May Not Have Sold The oldest explanation for Sharaku's disappearance is commercial: his prints stopped selling. Edo's actor-print buyers generally wanted a favourite performer flattered. Sharaku gave them faces distorted by effort, vanity or malice, and later writers assumed that actors, their fans, or the theatres themselves objected. Tsutaya had reason to be careful about objections. Three years earlier, in 1791, censors enforcing the Kansei Reforms had fined him half his personal wealth over books he had published by the writer Santō Kyōden, ruled to have broken the new decency laws. A publisher already punished once for pushing too far had a clear motive to drop a designer causing him trouble a second time. Recent researchers are less certain that unpopularity explains everything. No sales record survives, and no contemporary complaint documents actors or audiences reacting against him; the idea rests mostly on inference from the prints themselves. Other explanations compete with it: that Sharaku lost the co-operation of the actors he depicted and so could no longer sit close enough to draw them, or that Tsutaya simply redirected his money toward other designers, Utamaro among them, once the novelty wore off. None of these theories has displaced the others. What is certain is that after the first month of 1795, the commissions ended. Fifty Years of Silence, Then a Name For half a century after 1795, nobody wrote down who Sharaku was. The earliest surviving attempt appears only in 1844, in an expanded edition of the Ukiyo-e Ruikō (Ukiyo-e Miscellany) revised by Saitō Gesshin. It gives Sharaku's real name as Saitō Jūrōbei and an address: Kyōbashi Hatchōbori, in what is now central Tokyo. That is the entire biographical record. No portrait of him survives, no family history, no explanation of why a name attached to roughly 150 prints should surface only after fifty years of silence. Ignored at Home, Rediscovered Abroad Sharaku's reputation did not travel well within Japan. Through the nineteenth century, Japanese writing on ukiyo-e treated him as a minor figure beside more prolific and more popular designers. What changed his standing was a book published in Munich in 1910: Sharaku, by the German art historian Julius Kurth. Kurth set the actor busts beside Rembrandt and Velázquez, arguing that Sharaku belonged among the major portraitists of any tradition, not just among ukiyo-e specialists. The book arrived at the height of Japonisme, when European collectors were already assembling print collections and looking for the next name to champion. A second, expanded edition followed in 1922. Japanese scholarship caught up afterwards, reclaiming an artist whose reputation had, by then, already been made somewhere else. The Noh Actor Theory Saitō Gesshin's 1844 identification remains the theory most specialists take seriously, and later research has added circumstantial detail to it. Saitō Jūrōbei was a Noh performer employed by the Hachisuka family, daimyō of the Awa domain (present-day Tokushima), who kept a residence in Edo at Kyōbashi Hatchōbori, matching the 1844 address exactly. Domain records show the Awa lord in Edo from the sixth day of the fourth month of 1793, then absent from the twenty-first day of the fourth month of 1794 until the second day of the fourth month of 1796, travelling to his domain under the shogunate's sankin-kōtai (alternate-attendance) system. If Jūrōbei did not have to travel with him, he would have been free in Edo for almost exactly the window in which Sharaku was active. A Noh programme from 1816 lists a performer of the same name, confirming that a Noh actor called Saitō Jūrōbei genuinely existed, though that alone does not prove he was Sharaku. Other candidates have been proposed since, none with comparable supporting detail. Most standard references now treat the identification as the leading theory rather than as settled fact. If Saitō Jūrōbei really was Sharaku, he went back to performing Noh and never designed another print. Kabuki's most unsparing portraitist worked for ten months, then chose, or was made, to disappear. Masters of Ukiyo-e What Is Ukiyo-e? Hokusai Hiroshige Utamaro Sharaku Kuniyoshi Yoshitoshi Ohara Koson