Hishikawa Moroshige

Hishikawa Moroshige (菱川師重, active c. 1684-1704) was a late seventeenth-century Edo ukiyo-e artist who worked within the immediate orbit of Hishikawa Moronobu, the founder of single-sheet ukiyo-e, and carried Moronobu's foundational compositional vocabulary forward into the closing decades of the seventeenth century and the opening years of the eighteenth. Active during the Genroku era (1688-1704), the cultural high tide of early Edo when the woodblock print trade was first crystallizing into a coherent commercial art form, Moroshige produced sumizuri-e single sheets and illustrated books that helped extend the Hishikawa school's reach across the rapidly expanding urban market for printed images. His work is also documented under the alternative surname Furuyama, a name that members of the Hishikawa school adopted from the family's earlier connection to Kyoto textile dyeing, and major Western collections including the Art Institute of Chicago hold prints attributed to him under both the Hishikawa and Furuyama designations.

Moroshige's relationship to Hishikawa Moronobu (c. 1618-1694) is generally understood as that of a direct pupil or close studio associate, although the precise nature of the connection — whether familial, adoptive, or strictly pedagogical — has not been definitively established. He shares his name's second character (重, shige) with several other Hishikawa-school artists of the period, including the better-documented Hishikawa Morofusa (Moronobu's son who eventually returned to the family textile trade) and Hishikawa Moronaga, suggesting membership in a school workshop where naming conventions reflected lineage and rank. The Hishikawa workshop in late seventeenth-century Edo was the dominant force in single-sheet ukiyo-e production, and its pupils inherited a thoroughly developed compositional vocabulary built on confident black-line draftsmanship, dense patterning of textiles and interiors, and the panoramic horizontal arrangements that Moronobu had pioneered.

Moroshige's active period of approximately 1684 to 1704 places him at a pivotal transitional moment in ukiyo-e. The 1680s and 1690s saw the genre move definitively from book illustration (the medium in which Moronobu had first established his reputation) toward single-sheet prints intended for individual purchase and display, and the early years of the eighteenth century would soon witness the first experiments with hand-colored tan-e and the subsequent emergence of urushi-e (lacquer pictures) and beni-e (rose-red pictures). Moroshige's surviving output is firmly anchored in the sumizuri-e (ink-printed) mode of the late seventeenth century, with single-sheet ōban prints and illustrated books printed in single-block black ink and intended either to be experienced as monochrome compositions or to receive informal hand-coloring at the discretion of the purchaser. His subject range includes the standard Hishikawa-school repertory of pleasure-quarter scenes, intimate genre subjects, and theatrical imagery — the last documented by his contributions to actor-pictures books that record the kabuki performers of the four Edo theaters of the Genroku period.