Kondō Kiyoharu

Kondō Kiyoharu (active circa 1704-1733) is one of the most distinctive and elusive figures of early Edo ukiyo-e, a designer of single-sheet prints and illustrated books whose career spans the formative urushi-e era of the early eighteenth century, the brief flowering of beni-e hand coloring, and the rise of Edo as the unrivaled center of Japanese woodblock publishing. Working in the second generation after Hishikawa Moronobu had established ukiyo-e as an independent printed art form, Kiyoharu produced a body of work whose tonal range — from the comic and irreverent kyōga of his book illustrations to the dignified historical and Buddhist subjects of his single sheets — registers the breadth of what the Edo print could do in the decades before color woodblock printing finally replaced hand coloring as the dominant chromatic technology.

Very little reliable biographical detail about Kondō Kiyoharu survives. Surviving signed and sealed prints and books place his active career roughly between 1704 and 1733, corresponding to the Hōei, Shōtoku, and Kyōhō eras of the Tokugawa calendar — the same generation as Okumura Masanobu, Torii Kiyonobu I, and Nishimura Shigenaga, with whom Kiyoharu's stylistic affiliations are clearest. Scholars have associated him at various points with the Tosa school of yamato-e painting on the basis of the courtly subjects and somewhat archaic figural style of certain of his works, but he is now generally classified within the early Edo ukiyo-e milieu, drawing simultaneously on Tosa narrative conventions, on the Hishikawa-school template inherited from Moronobu, and on the emerging Torii-school manner of kabuki-actor representation that was reshaping Edo print culture during his lifetime.

Kiyoharu's single-sheet prints belong almost entirely to the world of urushi-e, the hand-colored woodblock prints of the early eighteenth century whose name derives from the lustrous black accents — often mixed with animal glue to imitate the sheen of lacquer — that ornamented the printed sumi line. Urushi-e prints were typically built up from a black-line woodblock impression and then hand-colored with safflower-derived beni pink, ochres, yellows, and occasional copper-bearing greens, with the lacquer-like blacks applied selectively to obi sashes, headdresses, and other passages where a deep sheen suggested costly textile or polished hair. Kiyoharu was an accomplished practitioner of this mode, and many of his surviving sheets are catalogued specifically as hosoban urushi-e — narrow vertical prints, roughly thirty by fifteen centimeters, that became the dominant ukiyo-e format of the 1710s and 1720s. The hosoban, smaller and cheaper than the oban, encouraged compositional concentration and gave the urushi-e era its characteristic intimate scale.

His subject matter ranged unusually widely for the period. Like Torii Kiyonobu, he produced actor prints, including hosoban portraits of named kabuki performers whose stage presence the prints commemorated and sold to fans. Unlike most of his Torii-school contemporaries, however, he also took up explicitly historical and religious subjects rarely treated in the ukiyo-e single sheet of the early eighteenth century: episodes from the Genpei War such as Kumagai Naozane's encounter with the young Taira no Atsumori at the battle of Ichi-no-tani; portraits of the deified scholar-courtier Sugawara no Michizane, worshipped as the Tenjin deity of Tenmangū shrines; and the birth of the Buddha Sakyamuni among adoring devas, a subject more often encountered in Buddhist painting than in popular woodblock printing. The breadth of his iconographic reach is one of the distinguishing features of his oeuvre, and it places him among the early Edo print designers who most actively tested the capacity of the new medium to absorb subjects from courtly and devotional painting.