Kitao Masayoshi

Kitao Masayoshi (1764-1824), better known by his art name Keisai Masayoshi, was an Edo print designer, illustrator, and painter whose innovative sketch albums revolutionized Japanese pictorial design and laid the conceptual groundwork for what would later be called manga. Although he began his career squarely within the ukiyo-e tradition, designing color prints and book illustrations for the commercial publishers of Edo, Kitao Masayoshi gradually transformed himself into something rarer: a draftsman of brilliant pictorial shorthand whose compressed, witty drawings of people, animals, fish, plants, and landscapes influenced an entire generation of Japanese artists, including Katsushika Hokusai.

Masayoshi was born in 1764 in Edo (modern Tokyo) as Kitabatake Chijiroaka, into a townsman family. As a young man he entered the studio of Kitao Shigemasa, one of the most respected figures of the late eighteenth-century Edo art world and founder of the Kitao school. Shigemasa was a versatile master who designed bijinga (pictures of beautiful women), illustrated kibyoshi (yellow-cover) novels, and produced printed picture books that combined elegant figure drawing with refined book design. Under Shigemasa's mentorship, Masayoshi absorbed both the technical craft of woodblock production and the broader Edo culture of literary illustration. He took the name Kitao Masayoshi in keeping with the Kitao school tradition, and by the early 1780s he was already producing book illustrations and single-sheet ukiyo-e prints.

The first decade of his career saw Kitao Masayoshi working in the established commercial genres. He designed bijin prints in the Kitao manner, illustrated popular fiction by writers such as Santo Kyoden, and contributed to the fashionable uki-e (perspective picture) format that used borrowed European one-point perspective to render theatrical scenes and urban views. His series of perspective prints depicting acts from Kanadehon Chushingura, the canonical story of the forty-seven loyal retainers, places him within the broader Edo print culture of the late 1780s and 1790s, when uki-e enjoyed renewed popularity as a way of dramatizing kabuki narratives. These works show a designer fluent in the conventions of his day, comfortable with the bright color palettes and the dramatic compositions that the commercial market demanded.

The pivotal shift in Masayoshi's career came in the 1790s, when he turned away from the ukiyo-e single-sheet market and concentrated his energies on a new format that would become his lasting contribution: the ryakugashiki, or sketch-style picture book. The Japanese word ryakuga literally means "abbreviated picture," and these books were collections of figures, animals, plants, and landscapes rendered in a deliberately reductive, calligraphic line that captured the essence of a subject with extraordinary economy. The first of these, Ryakugashiki, appeared in 1795, followed quickly by Jinbutsu ryakugashiki (Abbreviated Pictures of People), Choju ryakugashiki (Abbreviated Pictures of Birds and Animals) in 1797, Sansui ryakugashiki (Abbreviated Pictures of Landscapes) around 1800, Gyokai ryakugashiki (Abbreviated Pictures of Fish and Shellfish) in 1802, and Soka ryakugashiki (Abbreviated Pictures of Plants and Flowers) around 1813. Taken together, these volumes constitute a comprehensive visual encyclopedia of the natural and human world, rendered with a compositional shorthand that had no real precedent in Japanese book illustration.