The Influential Ukiyo-e Artist Torii Kiyonaga.

For the early writers on ukiyo-e prints such as Fennelosa, Ficke or Binyon, Torii Kiyonaga‘s work marked the apogee of the whole ukiyo-e school, with the result that they saw a steady decline of his artistic standards in the later artists, whose works they described as ‘decadent’. Such splendid isolation of one artist naturally entailed that following generations of authors tended to neglect him in favour of ‘discovering’ other artists. As a result, it is now more difficult to give an unbiased account of Kiyonaga’s place in the ukiyo-e school than that of any other artist.

 

Spell

One thing is certain: like > Harunobu before him, Kiyonaga influenced most contemporary artists profoundly and during the 1780s little work seems to have been produced that did not fall under his spell. Luckily Kiyonaga is one of the few artists whose work is described in an oeuvre catalogue (Chie Hirano, Kiyonaga, 1939). A short summary of theories about his birthplace and family name by Mizoguchi Yasumaro is found in Ukiyo-e Art, 37 (1973).

 

Torii

Kiyonaga was born in 1752 either in Edo, according to the Ukiyo-e Ruiko, or in Uraga, Sagami province, according to the Torii family tradition. His earliest work (Hirano, I) was printed in 1767 when he was a pupil of Kiyomitsu, the head of the Torii school which specialized in actor prints and banzuke (theatre playbill). From 1774 onwards he designed the series ‘Twelve Stages in Matrimony’ (Hirano 45-49), his first important series with women as a subject. During these years he was still very much influenced by Harunobu and > Koryusai. Harunobu’s rendering of the dreamy, quasi-divine woman was recaptured by Kiyonaga who revitalized that idealized vision, while never losing sight of the importance of her physicality.

 

Elongated Figure

In the following years he became the leading designer of both theatrical and female subjects, greatly influencing younger artists such as Shuncho and Utamaro. Although he was probably not the first to design oban diptychs and triptychs, his compositions in these with the figures spaced out across the sheets in processional arrangement, were to set the standard in the years to come. Kiyonaga maintained this method of composition in most of his prints introducing a new kind of feminity: women with intense, expressive faces and an elongated figure with sinuous, softened lines. This tendency was to be followed by most artists of that time.

 

Decline

Critics who have tried to figure out the reason behind Kiyonaga´s creative decline which started during the early 1780s encountered at least two factors for his tendency to produce more stereotypical images: his increased investment of energy in running the studio that produced theatre prints following the death of his teacher, Kiyomitsu, in 1785, and the rising star of Utamaro, which was to eclipse all the othjer artists. In fact, from the 1790s Kiyonaga produced very few prints, and between 1800 and his death in 1815, almost none.