Furuyama Moromasa

Furuyama Moromasa (古山師政, active c. 1715-1740s) was an early 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 developed the hand-coloring and limited two-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 Okumura Masanobu, Torii Kiyomasu, and Nishimura Shigenaga, but the surviving examples in major collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art document an artist of distinct compositional ambition and a firm command of Hishikawa lineage style.

Moromasa's surname Furuyama signals his affiliation with the Hishikawa school as it descended from Hishikawa Moronobu (c. 1618-1694), the founder of single-sheet ukiyo-e. Moronobu's son, Hishikawa Morofusa, eventually abandoned the print trade to return to his ancestral profession of textile dyeing under the name Furuyama, and the Furuyama line of Hishikawa-school artists continued to produce prints into the eighteenth century. Moromasa is generally placed within this Furuyama branch, where he is also referred to in some sources as Hishikawa Moromasa, reflecting the way Edo-period artists frequently maintained multiple affiliated names. Whether he was a direct biological descendant of Morofusa or a studio pupil who inherited the Furuyama name is not settled in the scholarship, but his pictorial vocabulary squarely identifies him as an inheritor of Moronobu's compositional templates.

His active career spans approximately three 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 worked across these techniques, with surviving prints documenting his command of both sumizuri-e and the hand-colored beni-e and urushi-e modes that defined early-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e. The o-oban yoko-e format, the large horizontal sheet, was a particular Moromasa specialty, allowing him to develop panoramic compositions 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, seasonal entertainments, and auspicious imagery. His Treasure Ship (Takarabune) print, datable to the early years of his career, addresses the New Year's iconographic tradition of the seven gods of good fortune crossing a treasure-laden ship into the harbor of the new year, a subject of perennial popularity in Edo woodblock printing. His New Yoshiwara compositions document 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. His seasonal genre scenes, such as the shellfish-gathering parties at Shinagawa, contributed to the meisho-e (famous-place pictures) tradition that was crystallizing in the 1730s and 1740s and would eventually flower in the work of Utagawa Hiroshige a century later.