Furuyama Moromasa

Furuyama Moromasa (古山師政) was an early-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e artist who carried the Hishikawa school's foundational visual vocabulary into the urushi-e and beni-e era of the early-to-mid eighteenth century. Working at a transitional moment between the monochromatic sumizuri-e of Hishikawa Moronobu's late seventeenth-century single sheets and the polychrome nishiki-e revolution that Suzuki Harunobu would launch in the 1760s, Moromasa belonged to the generation of artists who worked in the hand-coloring and limited-block techniques that bridged the gap. His prints are scarce today and his biographical details are less documented than those of his more famous contemporaries such as Okumura Masanobu, Torii Kiyomasu, and Nishimura Shigenaga, but surviving examples in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago document an artist of distinct compositional ambition and a firm command of Hishikawa-lineage style.

Moromasa's surname Furuyama identifies him with the Furuyama line, a branch of the Hishikawa school descended from Hishikawa Moronobu (c. 1618–1694), the founder of single-sheet ukiyo-e. His father, Furuyama Moroshige, trained in Moronobu's circle — described in some sources as the master's son and in others as his senior pupil — and established the separate Furuyama lineage whose name Moromasa inherited; he is accordingly referred to in some catalogues as Hishikawa Moromasa. Whether the Furuyama artists were direct biological descendants of Moronobu or studio pupils who carried the name is not fully settled in the scholarship, but Moromasa's pictorial vocabulary squarely identifies him as an inheritor of Moronobu's compositional templates.

His career fell in the first half of the eighteenth century — museum records variously place his activity across the decades from around 1715 through the 1740s — encompassing the late Genroku and Kyoho cultural reigns. This was the period when sumizuri-e was being supplemented and gradually displaced by the urushi-e (lacquer pictures), in which black areas were enriched with a glue-and-lacquer mixture to produce a glossy, jet-black finish, and by the beni-e (rose-red pictures), which added the pink beni pigment derived from safflower to hand-coloring schemes. Moromasa's prints reflect these early-eighteenth-century Edo techniques, and he is remembered in particular as one of the first Japanese artists to employ Western-style linear perspective, used to render receding interiors such as teahouses in the genre known as uki-e ("perspective pictures"). These large horizontal (yoko-e) compositions allowed him to develop panoramic interior and street scenes that recalled the painted handscroll tradition.

In subject matter, Moromasa stayed close to the foundational Hishikawa-school themes: scenes of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, depictions of urban leisure, sporting contests, and seasonal entertainments. His large print A Game of Hand Sumo in the New Yoshiwara, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts the pleasure quarter as it was after its 1657 relocation to Asakusa — the Shin Yoshiwara that had become the social and cultural center of Edo's floating world by the mid-eighteenth century. Alongside his prints he also produced paintings in the popular bijin-ga ("beautiful women") category, and his genre scenes contributed to the broadening range of everyday urban subjects that Edo woodblock printing was developing in the 1730s and 1740s.

Moromasa is recognized today as a substantial but lesser-known figure in the Hishikawa-school transmission, an artist whose surviving prints and paintings, scattered across major Western and Japanese museum collections, help reconstruct the early-eighteenth-century evolution of Edo woodblock printing in the years before the polychrome revolution.