Komatsuya Hyakki

Komatsuya Hyakki (小松屋百亀, 1720-1794) was an Edo merchant and amateur ukiyo-e designer whose place in the history of Japanese woodblock printing rests less on the volume of his surviving prints than on the specific cultural moment he occupied. A wealthy proprietor of the Komatsuya, a medicine shop at Iida-machi in Edo, Hyakki belonged to the network of cultivated samurai-class hatamoto, prosperous townsmen, and amateur poets whose collaborative experiments with private calendar prints (e-goyomi) in 1765 produced the technological and aesthetic breakthrough that historians have long credited as the birth of full-color nishiki-e (brocade pictures). In the small body of chuban-format prints he designed during 1765 and 1766, most of which survive today chiefly in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, Hyakki worked at the experimental edge of a printing revolution he helped bring about.

Hyakki's family business, the Komatsuya, was a well-established kusuriya (apothecary) in the Iidamachi district of Edo, in a long-established quarter of substantial merchant houses. The Komatsuya name (literally 'little pine shop') was the kind of poetic commercial appellation favored by wealthy Edo merchants of the period, and the family's prosperity gave Hyakki the leisure and disposable income to cultivate the literary and artistic accomplishments characteristic of his class. His art-name Hyakki is written with characters meaning 'hundred turtles,' the turtle being a traditional East Asian emblem of longevity, and his wealth and social standing placed him among the cultivated amateurs whose commissions drove the 1765 calendar-print venture.

The central event of Hyakki's artistic biography, and the reason he is remembered in standard histories of ukiyo-e, is his participation in the 1765 calendar-print venture that produced the first true polychrome nishiki-e. In Meiwa 2 (1765), the hatamoto (direct retainer of the shogun) Ōkubo Jinshirō and his associate Abe Hachinoshin, working in cooperation with Hyakki, drove the development of the new multi-color printing technique, organizing an exchange of e-goyomi (picture calendars) among an elite circle of cultivated Edo amateurs. These calendar prints encoded the long and short months of the lunar year within the picture composition itself (numbers hidden in fan patterns, kimono designs, garden lanterns, and the like), and they were commissioned by wealthy amateurs from professional designers and printers to be exchanged as elegant New Year's gifts. The patrons of the exchange spared no expense, demanding registration of multiple color blocks with kento (corner-and-edge registration marks) of unprecedented precision, the use of expensive imported and domestic pigments, the application of gold and silver leaf, gauffrage (blind embossing) for tactile texture, and thick custom-made hosho papers. The professional designer most often associated with the breakthrough is Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-1770), but Hyakki himself also designed and signed a number of chuban prints in the same campaign, and the works that survive demonstrate the same technical opulence: full color, multiple blocks in careful register, metallic accents, and the chuban (medium-format) sheet size that became a standard ukiyo-e format of the following decade.

Hyakki's designs from 1765 and 1766, the bulk of his surviving output as an artist, span the iconographic range that the early nishiki-e generation favored. Several draw on legendary and historical subjects rendered in contemporary Japanese visual idioms, among them the legendary demon Shutendoji, whose palace at Ōeyama is the subject of one of his prints in the Buckingham Collection. Other prints address subjects closer to the floating-world repertoire of the urban ukiyo-e tradition: courtesans of the Yoshiwara and the bird-and-flower (kacho-e) subjects, such as pheasants amid cherry blossom, that nishiki-e artists used to showcase the new chromatic precision of their multi-block printing. Hyakki's style is closely aligned with Harunobu's: small, slender figures in classical poses, gently arched compositions, decorative patterning, and a refined, decorous mood that recalls the Heian court aesthetic the early nishiki-e generation deliberately invoked. Whether Hyakki and Harunobu worked in any formal master-pupil relation, or whether Hyakki was an independent amateur whose designs were realized by the same Edo blockcutters and printers who served Harunobu, is unclear; what the surviving evidence shows is an amateur designer whose social position in the 1765 calendar circle gave him access to the period's most accomplished print artisans.

After the 1765-1766 calendar campaign, Hyakki seems to have largely withdrawn from print design and to have returned to his primary occupation as an Iidamachi merchant. He died in 1794 at the age of seventy-four, having outlived Harunobu by nearly a quarter-century. The Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese woodblock prints, assembled in Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the collector Clarence Buckingham (1854-1913) and given to the Art Institute of Chicago in his memory by his sister Kate Buckingham, contains the most substantial single repository of Hyakki's surviving designs, and the cataloguing work of generations of scholars from Frederick W. Gookin onward has made these prints the foundation of modern Hyakki studies. Today Hyakki is recognized less for the size of his oeuvre than for his pivotal role at the moment ukiyo-e turned chromatic, an amateur artist whose participation in a single brilliant New Year's exchange helped open the polychrome era that would carry Japanese woodblock printing through its greatest century.