Kitagawa Toyohide

Kitagawa Toyohide (北川豊秀), who signed his prints under the personal go (art-name) Ichiryūtei (一流亭), and occasionally Isshintei (一信亭), was an Osaka ukiyo-e printmaker active across an exceptionally narrow window of years between 1838 and 1843. Only a handful of designs - probably fewer than fifteen - can be attributed to him today, a body of work whose abrupt curtailment was a direct consequence of the Tenpō Reforms of 1842, the shogunate's wide-ranging programme of sumptuary legislation that virtually halted print publication in Osaka for five years and that defined the limits of his career.

Nothing certain is known of his birth, his death, or his early training, and the surviving published scholarship - most thoroughly assembled on osakaprints.com under the curation of John Fiorillo - notes only that the use of a 'Toyo' element in his name predates Utagawa Kunisada's adoption of the Toyokuni name by six years, which has invited speculation, never fully proven, that he received some form of training in the orbit of Utagawa Toyokuni I or another Utagawa master. The toshidama cartouche - a stylised wish-fulfilling jewel that the Utagawa school used as its identifying mark - appears on some of Toyohide's prints, which supports though does not confirm an Utagawa-school apprenticeship. Whatever his lineage, by the late 1830s he was working in the Osaka publishing trade and producing yakusha-e (actor prints) for the city's three main theatres.

Kamigata (Osaka-Kyoto) print culture of the late 1830s and early 1840s differed in important respects from the contemporaneous Edo ukiyo-e market. Osaka prints were produced in much smaller editions for a more closely-knit community of theatre patrons, kabuki critics, and amateur poets, and they tended to favour single-actor compositions on the ōban-format vertical sheet over the wider triptych formats favoured in Edo. Connoisseurship of fine printing was particularly high in the Osaka market, and many Osaka prints of this period - including Toyohide's - were issued in deluxe editions employing metallic pigments, mica, blind embossing, and other refinements that drove up their cost but secured the loyalty of collectors. The leading Osaka publishers of the period - Honsei, Tenki, Honchikuya, and others - issued small print runs aimed at this connoisseur audience rather than the larger commercial market that Edo publishers commanded.

Toyohide's recorded works concentrate on portraits of leading kabuki actors of the Osaka stage at the close of the 1830s and the opening of the 1840s, the period in which the actor Arashi Rikan II - one of the great onnagata of his generation - was dominating the Kado-no-shibai and the Naka-no-shibai theatres of Osaka. Toyohide's surviving prints document specific named roles - Onoe Kikugorō III as Shirai Gonpachi in Ume no hatsuharu gojūsantsugi at the Kado Theatre in March 1841; Ichikawa Danzō as the courtesan Akoya in 1839; Kataoka Gadō II in two separate 1841 roles; Arashi Tokusaburō II as Miyamoto Musashi in Katakiuchi ganryūjima at the Kado-no-shibai in March 1843 - and supply scholarship with detailed information about Osaka stage practice in the final months before the Tenpō crackdown.