Twelve Hours of the Green Houses (1794–1795)
(Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
Love to every one ♥
These are Utamaro’s depiction of each of the twelve hours of the traditional Japanese clock. The Hours constitute a series of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) prints. Utamaro is the first of the three Japanese artists I have featured. His bijinga, or bi-jinga (“beautiful person picture”) earned him fame.
Animals
Each hour is named after an animal. Japan has its bestiary, except that the symbolism attached to Oriental animals often differs from the symbolism attached to animals inhabiting the Western bestiary. The significance of each animal has little to do with the “real” or mythical animal. These animals are anthropomorphic, i.e. humans in disguise.
Human beings have chronicled time, beginning with hours. However, months are also chronicled as are seasons: soltices and equinoxes. Meisho (“famous places”) prints show not only famous places, but people going about their everyday activities or domestic duties and some are divided according to seasons. Utagawa Hiroshige‘s series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo is divided into seasons.
Twelve Hours of the Green Houses (1794–1795)
(Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
These are Utamaro’s depiction of each of the twelve hours of the traditional Japanese clock. The Hours constitute a series of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) prints. Utamaro is the first of the three Japanese artists I have featured. His bijinga (“beautiful person picture”) earned him fame.
Animals
Each hour is named after an animal. Japan has its bestiary, except that the symbolism attached to Oriental animals often differs from the symbolism attached to animals inhabiting the Western bestiary. The significance of each animal has little to do with the “real” or mythical animal. These animals are anthropomorphic, i.e. humans in disguise.
Human beings have chronicled time, beginning with hours. However, months are also chronicled as are seasons: soltices and equinoxes. Meisho (“famous places”) prints show not only famous places, but people going about their everyday activities or domestic duties and some are divided according to seasons. Utagawa Hiroshige‘s series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo is divided into seasons.
Part of this post is borrowed from an earlier post that featured Mary Cassatt (22 May 1844 – 14 June 1926). At the time I wrote my earlier post, we had not discussed the influence of Japanese art on Western artists. However, we have now opened that door by showing how Japonism had an impact on the art of Toulouse-Lautrec. But Japonism also influenced other artists, one of whom is Mary Cassatt.
Japonism left its imprint in many ways, but we will focus on two ways: subject matter and style. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (11 July 1834 – 17 July 1903) and William Merritt Chase (1 November 1849 – 25 October 1916) featured an oriental subject matter: kimonos, blue and white porcelain, folding screens, fans, etc. As for Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, his “Japonisme” was, to a large extent, a matter of composition. Theretofore, artists had usually arranged their subject matter using the Greek “Golden Section.” (See Golden ratio, Wikipedia.) Without stating that beauty is an absolute, the Greeks had noticed that an artwork was considered more beautiful by a large number of people if a certain template was used. This template is the Golden Section, which looks like an off-centre crucifix and it does indeed characterize the composition of a large number of drawings, prints and paintings.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Given that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a trained artist, I would presume he was familiar with the Golden Section. However, in Lautrec’s works, one of the two intersecting lines of the Golden Section, is a diagonal line, which is a departure from the usual vertical line intersecting an horizontal line. That is a feature of Japonism.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec‘s Japonisme was therefore expressed in his compositional technique. As for colour, it is a flat colour, which is consistent with printmaking. If one looks at the dress worn by May Belfort in Jardin de Paris, May Belfort (1883; Art Nouveau) (please click on the link to see the artwork), one notices that May’s dress is evenly red. Lautrec rendered dimensionality by using lines, which is also a feature of Japonisme. His Moulin Rouge, La Goulue with her Sister(1892; Art Nouveau) is an example of linearity. There is a line on one side of La Goulue’s dress. Which takes us to Mary Cassatt.
Mary Cassatt (22 May 1844 – 14 June 1926) was an American artist of French descent born to an upper-middle-class family in what was becoming Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was educated in the United States and various European countries: Spain, Italy and Holland. However, although she began studying the fine arts in the United States, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, it would not be long before she moved to Paris and became a permanent “expat.” She did so in 1871, but returned to the United States almost immediately, the Franco-Prussian War (19 July 1870 – 10 May 1871) having erupted.
Mary Cassat’s Japonisme shows affinities with that of Toulouse-Lautrec in that it is our second type of Japonism, Japonism revealed in the manner an artist creates his or her work rather than in his or her choice of subject matter. From the point of view of composition, the art of Mary Cassatt resembles that of Lautrec. We have an off-centre Golden Section and one of the intersecting lines is a diagonal line, a discreet diagonal line.
Moreover, her colours are flat colours whose dimensionality is expressed mostly through the use of lines. The art of Mary Cassatt is otherwise unrelated to that of Toulouse-Lautrec. Mary Cassatt did not make posters showing the Moulin Rouge and can-can dancers. Moreover, compared with Toulouse-Lautrec, her colours are subdued.
Although I have stated that Mary Cassatt’s subject matter was not Oriental, she sometimes featured a woman holding a fan. However, her main subject matter are the Madonna and Child of the Renaissance, women and genre painting, depictions of people going about their daily activities. Genre painting was introduced by artists of the Dutch Golden Age and is a characteristic of Japanese meisho “famous places” prints, but in a context so different from Western art as to be a negligible similarity.
The Paris Japanese Arts Exhibition of 1890
Mary visited the Paris Japanese Arts Exhibition of 1890 and so loved the works she saw that she devoted the following year to making prints. She had an admirer and close friend in Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917). He was impressed with her work and encouraged her to show it at Impressionist exhibits, which she did eventually. Degas, whose pastels she loved, taught her how to make etchings. To this day, artists often learn to make prints as several copies of their art are produced which makes their artwork more affordable. But, in the case of Mary Cassatt’s work, learning to make etchings benefitted her Japonism probably more than it benefitted her clients. She could and did produce prints that may well be our best example of Japonisme.
According to Germaine Greer, “[t]he exhibition of Japanese art at the Palais des Beaux-Arts had revealed [to Mary Cassatt] the lightness and grace of the alternative aesthetic, beside which the pompous works of recognized artists seemed all the more laboured, explicit, heavy and lustreless.”[i] Mary was so impressed by the prints she saw and studied that she devoted the year 1891 to making prints, working in drypoint. Having traced her drawing on copper, as is the practice in etchings, she “laid in a soft ground over the part that she wished to colour and applied the colours all at once, by a technique that she called ‘à la poupée’ (doll-like), working with rags tied over little sticks. She and her printer then ran the plates by hand through the press.” (Greer, p. 112).
These prints were shown and Mary’s friend Degas was astonished: “I will not admit that a woman will draw so well.” Using the technique she devised, artist Mary Cassatt drew lines and put in a flat colour, in which her art resembles that of Toulouse-Lautrec. Moreover, from the point of view of composition, Mary also used Lautrec’s diagonal lines, albeit discreetly. Grace permeates not only the prints created in 1990-1991, but it also does all of her paintings.
For instance, although the work featured at the top of this post is not a print, we can observe readily the influence of Japanese woodblock printing and, more precisely, that of ukiyo-e, “pictures of the floating world,” prints. As is the case with Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints, Mary’s prints are linear and the colour, mainly flat. However, to return to the painting featured at the top of this post, the manner in which artist Mary Cassatt depicted the lady’s hair reflects Western art. The lady’s hair is not a flat black, but her hairdo shows Japonism. This Japonism is one of subject matter, our first form of Japonism, but marginally.
Germaine Greer writes that, “[Mary Cassatt’s] designs are as deceptively simple and self-effacing as a haiku.” (Greer, p. 112). A haiku is a very short Japanese poem, usually 17 on in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 on respectively. Such poetry expresses an “essence,” and can therefore be associated with Impressionism, or an attempt to capture the evanescent moment when light touches and molds the subject, giving it constant newness. (See Impressionism, Wikipedia.)
Biographical Notes
In nineteenth-century France, women were denied access to the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, not to mention the right to vote, a cause Mary Cassatt would embrace especially in her later years, when cataracts all but blinded her. Therefore, given the exclusion of women from the Paris École des Beaux-Arts, Mary Cassatt studied privately under academicistJean-Léon Gérôme.
The above were “realist” works that showed the influence of Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877). However, as of 1877, Cassatt’s work would no longer be accepted by the Paris Salon. At Degas’s request, Mary therefore showed eleven of her works at the Impressionist exhibit of 1879. She then joined the Impressionists in shows that took place in 1880, 1881, and 1886.[ii] Yet, Mary Cassatt’s Japoniste prints and paintings cannot be associated with Impressionism, except by date. Let us say that Cassatt had a Japoniste period.
As mentioned earlier, once she returned to France, via Italy,[iii] in 1874, Cassatt also received guidance from painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Edgar Degas (19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917). Moreover, she was inspired by the art of Camille Pissarro (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903). Degas and Pissarro were forerunners of Impressionism. As do many apprentices, Mary went to the Louvre on a daily basis and copied the masters. These visits to the Louvre also allowed her to meet other artists.
The Madonna and Child: Feminity and Motherliness
Mary decided not to marry. She felt she could not combine the duties of a wife and mother and the demands of a career as artist. However, as I have noted, her artwork are depictions of the Madonna and Child, particularly as of 1890. So there is femininity and motherliness in her art. Mary Cassatt also painted children and women and did genre work, depictions of domesticity. The Visit (please click on the title to see the artwork) and The Lamp, prints shown above, are examples of her genre painting. So are The Coiffure Study and The Bath. Intimacy pervades Cassatt’s art. This art cannot be associated with Impressionism, except by date.
Post-Impressionism, Fauvism (Henri Matisse) and Cubism (Georges Braque, Picasso, etc.), movements that followed Impressionism, were not to Mary’s liking. Besides, she developed various health problems, including cataracts. She continued to paint despite poor eyesight and, according to Wikipedia, “she took up the cause of women’s suffrage and, in 1915, she showed eighteen works in an exhibition supporting the movement.” She died eleven years later, on 14 June 1926, at Château de Beaufresne.
Mary Cassatt’s Japonisme, an intimate, feminine and motherly Japonisme, reached excellence as did most of her work. She was a fine artist who earned the of her peers. In 1894, she was described by Gustave Geffroy as one of “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism along with Marie Bracquemond and Berthe Morisot. Very few women are ever called “grandes dames.” (See Mary Cassatt, Wikipedia.)
William Merritt Chase was born in Indiana, but after moving to New York, he started travelling abroad and, among other activities, bought art for American clients. In France, he studied painting with Lemuel Wilmarth, (see Athenaeum), a student of Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904), an academicist, and then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Munich, where he was a student of Alexander Von Wagner and Karl von Piloty. As a student in Munich, he befriended Walter Shirlaw, Frank Duveneck, and Joseph Frank Currier, whose artwork, Currier’s, he collected. He travelled to Venice, Italy before returning to the United States in the summer of 1878. On his return to North-America, he showed Ready for the Ride with the newly formed Society of American Artists, of which he would later serve as president. He also opened a studio in New York in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he moved into Albert Bierstadt‘s former studio which he furnished in a rather “flamboyant” manner.
“Chase filled the studio with lavish furniture, decorative objects, stuffed birds, oriental carpets, and exotic musical instruments. The studio served as a focal point for the sophisticated and fashionable members of the New York City art world of the late 19th century.” (The Complete Works)
A Teacher and a Family Man
Chase became an almost unrivalled teacher. In 1891, he opened the Shinnecock Hills Summer School. In 1896, he founded the Chase School of Art which became the New York School of Art two years later with Chase staying on as instructor until 1907, but he also taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Among his students was famed artist Georgia O’Keefe, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley. In his later years, he travelled to various European countries to give summer classes.
Chase married Alice Gerson, his former model, in 1886, and the couple had eight children. His eldest daughters, Dieudonnée and Dorothy, often posed for their father. The family owned a townhouse in New York and another property on Long Island. Chase had a happy family life and died in his New York townhouse.
Japonisme
Pink Azaleas and Chinese VaseMaking her ToiletJapanese Print
Photo credit: The Complete Works(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
Conclusion
Japanese art spread to several European countries and crossed the Atlantic. For instance, it had an influence on Americans James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Merritt Chase, and Mary Cassatt. We will look at Japonisme in the art of Mary Cassatt. I believe she is our best example.
Moreover, a few comments are needed. Japonisme played a major role in the development of Western art in the second half of the nineteenth century.
However, for the time being, I pause.
* * *
Rachmaninoff‘s Piano Concerto N° 2 in C Minor, Opus 18
Utawaga Hiroshige (1797 – 12 October 1858), also called Andō Hiroshige and Ichiyūsai Hiroshige, his art-name, is the are of three Japanese ukiyo-eartists who had a major impact on European art in general and the Impressionists in particular. Japanese art was sent to Europe after a period of seclusion called sakoku. We have now reached the third and last ukiyo-e artist I will feature. Other ukiyo-e artists, printmakers, sent their artwork to Europe. Ukiyo-e prints were extremely popular and inexpensive. The three artists I am featuring are considered the most accomplished.
Childhood and Training
Hiroshige’s father, Andō Gen’emon, was one of thirty samurai who were fire warden protecting the Edo Castle. Hiroshige therefore lived in the Yayosu barracks, in the Yaesu area of Edo (today’s Tokyo). It appears Hiroshige’s first teacher was another fireman who taught him in the Chinese-influenced Kanō style of painting. However, it could be said that Hiroshige was mostly self-taught. For instance, he taught himself the impressionistic Shijō style. In fact, Hiroshige had difficulty finding a teacher, but nevertheless apprenticed under ukiyo-e master Utagawa Toyohiro. He would however inherit his father’s position as fire warden.
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
Yui-huku (16th station)Kameyama-Juku in the 1830s (46th station)
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (c. 1832-34)
In 1832, when his son was old enough to replace him as fire warden, Hiroshige was invited to join an embassy of Shogunal officials to the Imperial court and accepted the invitation. The road linked the shōgun‘s capital, Edo (Tokyo) to the imperial capital, Kyōto. Hiroshige stayed at fifty-three overnight stations along the road and made several sketches at each station.
According to Wikipedia, Hiroshige “carefully observed the Tōkaidō Road (or ‘Eastern Sea Route’), which wended its way along the shoreline, through a snowy mountain range, past Lake Biwa, and finally to Kyōto.” His series of prints, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, were extremely successful, and Hiroshige’s reputation was assured.” (See Hiroshige, Wikipedia.)
Famous Places in Kyōto (1834), Eight Views of Lake Biwa (1835),
Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō (c. 1837).
The success of his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō allowed Hiroshige to devote his time to his art and to teaching. In all, he made about 5,000 prints. His last series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, commissioned by a wealthy — if that is possible— Buddhist monk who paid “up-front,” which helped Hiroshige whose financial circumstances were relatively humble.
Hiroshige never lived to see the success of his One Hundred Famous Views of Edo(1856-1858).He became a Buddhist monk and started painting his Hundred Famous Views of Edo. He died, aged 62, during the great Edo cholera epidemic of 1858, but may not have been a victim of cholera. The Hundred Views were therefore completed by Chinpei Suzuki, a former apprentice who was married to Hiroshige’s daughter Otatsu and whose art-name became Hiroshige II. The couple separated and Otatsu married another student of her deceased father: Hiroshige III.
left: Hiroshige, “The Plum Garden in Kameido”
right: Van Gogh, “Flowering Plum Tree”
left: Hiroshige, “Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake”
right: Van Gogh, “The Bridge in the Rain”
Conclusion: a “Human Touch”
“Hiroshige captured the very essence of what he saw and turned it into a highly effective composition. There was in his work a human touch that no artist of the school had heretofore achieved; his pictures revealed a beauty that seemed somehow tangible and intimate. Snow, rain, mist, and moonlight scenes compose some of his most poetic masterpieces.”[i]
In this quotation from the Encyclopædia Britannica, the keywords are “the very essence of what he saw” and “a beauty that seemed somehow tangible and intimate.”
These words describe Hiroshige’s art, but they can also be used to describe Impressionism, the words “essence” and “intimate” in particular. To a large extent, Impressionism is characterized by what seems a brief glance at the subject, capturing the “essence,” which still makes art longer than life,[ii] and the personal manner in which the artist sees a “reality.”
Beauty is not an absolute. It is, very much, “in the eye of the beholder.” As for reality, it is as manifold as the ways it can be viewed.
Hiroshige also influenced Mir iskusstva, a twentieth-century Russian art movement in which Ivan Bilibin was a defining figure.
______________________________[i] Richard Lane, ed. “Hiroshige.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 03 Jul. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/266818/Hiroshige>.
[ii] As in:Ars longa, vita brevis.Resources:Andō Hiroshige (the most complete)Van Gogh dans la lumière japonaise d’HiroshigeTwo Women (Photo credit: probably, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Hirochige
Muzyka czarodzieja Hiroshige. W tle chiński flet bambusowy yogi. Idealna muzyka do medytacji! (ideal for meditation)
Bamboo flute
Beginning in the 1850s, the influence of Japonism on European art in general and French art in particular was pervasive. In my last post, I named three artists: Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige. All three were ukiyo-e painters of the Edo period. But there were other ukiyo-e painters and it is still possible to purchase Japanese estampes. Prints belonging to original series executed by our three artists and other masters are very expensive. However, affordable prints are available. Moreover one need not be ashamed of hanging a reproduction on a wall in one’s home.
In this post, I will simply discuss beauty: its relativity and mankind’s ability to see beauty in the unfamiliar. However, I will not do so in any depth.
Umegawa in Sagami Province, The Kazusa Province sea route
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji
Not only did Hokusai make a series of thirty-six prints depicting various views of Mount Fuji, but he went on to make a hundred: One-hundred Views of Mount Fuji(1834). Hokusai demonstrated that depending on the direction from which Mount Fuji was drawn, not to mention the weather and the season, depictions of its reality varied. To the Impressionists, this was grist to the mill as they were fascinated by the manner in which light kept reshaping reality.
The more important factor, however, was the popularity of an art that differed from Western art. As soon as they reached Europe, the Japanese prints were considered beautiful by artists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and, later, Vincent van Gogh. Claude Monet purchased as many prints as he could. This degree of enthusiasm attested to the fact that, even otherwise expressed, “reality” could be beautiful and that it could be beautiful to several individuals.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Given the popularity of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one could presume that beauty is an absolute. This cannot be the case, at least not altogether. What Europeans saw as beautiful was not the beauty their academicists rewarded, but an exotic form of beauty and, in the case of Hokusai’sThirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the beauty of one print in particular: The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The popularity of The Great Wave showed not only that many individuals could agree on what was and was not beautiful, but that many individuals could also agree that art rooted in an oriental form of aesthetics was beautiful. However, despite a consensus regarding the beauty of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, I doubt very much that its popularity suggested that beauty was an absolute.
Quotations
Allow me to quote one of my former professors who writes that, in 1874, a group of painters working in Paris formed a “loose association” and put on an exhibition under the title of “The Anonymous Society of Painters and Sculptors.” Critics were in attendance:
“To describe what they saw there, critics coined a new word—Impressionism. It was no compliment, however. As one of them put it: We have seen an exhibition by the Impressionalists . . . M. Manet is among those who maintain that in painting one can and ought to be satisfied with the impression. . . .[They] appear to have declared war on beauty.”[i]
Émile Zola spoke for the Impressionists when he declared flatly that,
“. . . Beauty is no longer an absolute, a preposterous universal standard. Beauty is identical with itself. . . . Beauty lives within us, not outside us. What do I care for philosophical abstraction, for an ideal perfection conjured up by a small group of men! What interests me as a man is mankind, the source of my life.”[ii]
However, I will close this post by quoting Van Gogh. (See Japonaiserie [Van Gogh], Wikipedia.)
“In a letter to Theo dated about 5 June 1888 Vincent remarks
About staying in the south, even if it’s more expensive — Look, we love Japanese painting, we’ve experienced its influence — all the Impressionists have that in common — [so why not go to Japan], in other words, to what is the equivalent of Japan, the south? So I believe that the future of the new art still lies in the south after all.”
_________________________[i] G. H. Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), p. 92. Quoted in Alan Gowans, The Restless Art, A History of Painters and Painting, 1760-1960(J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), p. 181.
[ii]Alan Gowans, loc. cit.
Amour déclaré (Love Revealed) (Photo credit: Wikipaintings)
Amour profondément caché (Love Profoundly Concealed) (Photo credit: Wikimedia)
Trois beautés de notre temps (Three Beauties) (Photo credit: Utamaro [FR], Utamaro [EN], Wikipedia)
Woman Wiping Sweat from her Brow, 1798 (Photo credit: Utamaro, Wikipedia)
(Please click on the images to enlarge them)
* * *
In the middle of the nineteenth century, as of Édouard Manet, Japanese art was very influential in the west, particularly in France. The term Anglo-Japanese style was used beginning in 1851. As for the term Japonisme, it was coined in 1872, almost after the fact. By 1872, Japonisme had already had a significant impact on French art.
Many Japanese artists created prints. However, the better known are
We will discuss Kitagawa Utamaro, who lived during the Edo, or Tokugawa, period (1603 and 1868) in the history of Japan. He arrived in Edo, the current-day Tokyo, with his mother under the name of Toyoaki[iii]. Utamaro was a pupil of Toriyama Sekien at the “aristocratic” KanōSchool and may have been his son. He lived in Sekien’s house while he was growing up. (See Utamaro, Wikipedia.)
Utamaro created several series of woodblock prints. Woodblock printing is the traditional form of Japanese printing and it has genres. Utamaro preferred using the popular ukiyo-eprinting. It allowed mass-production of prints. According to the EncyclopædiaBritannica, Utamaro is the greatest artists of theukiyo-e(“pictures of the floating world”) movement.[iv]
Beginning in 1782, in the earlier part of his life, Utamaro lived with Tsutaya Jūzaburō, a publisher who always remained a friend. During the years he spent with Jūzaburō, it is believed Utamaro worked as an illustrator of Kyōka Suigetsu (Mirror Flower, Water, Moon), sometimes called crazy poetry. At that point in his career, he also painted dancers and actors, kabuki.Examples are available at Google Images.
Nature revealed
However, between 1788 and 1791, Utamaro produced books depicting nature (insects, birds, shell). (See Utamaro, Wikipedia.)
(Please click on the image to enlarge it.)
(Photo credit: Google Images)
Flowers of Edo: Young Woman’s Narrative Chanting to the Samisen,c. 1800 (Photo credit: Utamaro, Wikipedia)
However, as of 1791, Utamaro focussed on creating several series of studies portraying women, usually wearing a kimono. Such artwork, to which Utamaro owes the celebrity he enjoyed during his lifetime, is called bijinga (bijin-ga [FR]). Utamaro’s studies of women are considered among the finest bijingaukiyo-e prints. Some of his bijinga prints depict a woman and a child at various stages of childhood. It has therefore been suggested that Utamaro married and had a child, which is mostly speculative but poetical.
Utamaro enjoyed erotica. He painted the courtesans, or prostitutes, of Edo’s Yoshiwara‘s “pleasure” district. It is rumoured that he lived near the Yoshiwara district and that he may have been born in that district. Utamaro published thirty shunga (erotica) books, many of which are listed in Wikipedia. For examples of bijinga and shunga, click on Utamaro.
Wikipedia (see Utamaro) provides a list of Utamaro’s collections of bijinga(bijin-ga [FR]) and shungaestampes (prints). Moreover, according to Wikipedia, Utamaro is best known for his:
Ten Studies in Female Physiognomy; A Collection of Reigning Beauties; Great Love Themes of Classical Poetry (sometimes called Women in Love containing individual prints such as Revealed Love and Pensive Love); and Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarters.”
A Terrible Pity
In 1804, he was sentenced to be handcuffed for fifty days for publishing prints depicting the concubines of military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi (2 February 1536 or 26 March 1537 – 18 September 1598). This sentence, horrible torture,[iii] crushed a proud Utamaro emotionally and ended his career. He died two years later, in 1806, at the age of 53.
Utamaro had produced some 2,000 prints and a number of paintings called surinomo, also prints, but produced in smaller quantities and for a more refined audience.
Utamaro, an immensely gifted artist, was discovered in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, prints made by Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige brought to the West the Anglo-Japanese style and Japonisme, or Japanism.
Japanese prints “had a major impact on Impressionistpainting.” Impressionists were influenced by “[t]he clarity of line, spaciousness of composition, and boldness and flatness of colour and light in Japanese prints had a direct impact on their work and on that of their followers.”[v]
According to Wikipedia, “artists were especially affected by the lack of perspective and shadow, the compositional freedom gained by placing the subject off-centre mostly with a low diagonal axis to the background.” (See Japonism, Wikipedia.)
Orientalism had precedents in Europe. Byzantine art and, especially, the art of the Ottoman Empire left an imprint. Among other historical circumstances, the Crusades and the travels of Marco Polo[vi] (c.1254 – 8–9 January 1324) contributed to a knowledge of the Orient in Europe. Trade routes were established.
However, when works were brought from Japan to Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, after a period of seclusion, named sakoku, Japonisme became a pervasive influence. It started to permeate European art, overriding movements and extending into the decorative arts and design. It may have dealt a blow to academic art, sometimes called “art pompier [pompous].”
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