Migita Toshihide

Migita Toshihide (右田年英, 1863-1925) was a Meiji-period ukiyo-e artist and nihonga painter best known today for his historical narrative prints, his bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), and above all for his extensive output of senso-e (war prints) chronicling Japan's two great late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century conflicts: the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Working at the intersection of traditional woodblock printing and the new visual journalism of the Meiji era, Toshihide bridged the late Edo print tradition he had inherited from his teacher Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and the modernizing visual culture of Imperial Japan.

Toshihide was born in 1863 in Usuki, in Bungo Province (present-day Oita Prefecture, Kyushu), in the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate. His given name was Toyohiko; he later took Toshihide as an artist name and over his career also signed work with such go as Gosai, Bansuiro, and Ichieisai. As a young man he traveled to Tokyo in pursuit of an artistic career, and around 1880 he entered the studio of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), then the leading ukiyo-e designer of the Meiji period and famous for his ambitious historical and supernatural series such as One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. Toshihide became one of Yoshitoshi's students, working alongside fellow pupils such as Mizuno Toshikata within the small group of Yoshitoshi's followers who carried late-Edo print traditions into the late Meiji era. From Yoshitoshi he absorbed a taste for dramatic narrative subjects, an emphasis on facial and gestural expression, and the carefully drawn line that distinguishes the best work of the school.

After completing his apprenticeship, Toshihide built a varied career as an illustrator, print designer, and painter. He worked extensively for the Tokyo illustrated press that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s, producing illustrations for the Tokyo Asahi Shinbun and its predecessor the Mesamashi Shinbun, and he contributed novel and serial illustrations that reached a wide popular audience. Many of his single-sheet historical prints reuse the kind of subject matter that had been canonical for Yoshitoshi: heroic moments from medieval warfare, Noh and kabuki episodes, supernatural confrontations, and exemplary deeds of valor.

The defining body of Toshihide's career, however, is his senso-e. When war with Qing China broke out in July 1894, Tokyo publishers responded with an enormous burst of woodblock prints depicting the conflict in oban triptych format, and Toshihide became one of the most active and most accomplished designers in the genre. Working for the Tokyo publishing houses of the day, he produced numerous triptychs covering the major engagements of 1894-95: the naval action off Pungdo, the land battle at Songhwan, the assault on Pyongyang, the naval battle of the Yellow Sea, the siege of Lushun (Port Arthur), and the surrender of the Chinese fleet at Weihaiwei. His Sino-Japanese War prints combine the vigorous figure drawing he had learned from Yoshitoshi with new pictorial conventions adapted from Western reportorial illustration: foreshortened modern weaponry, smoke and explosion effects, uniformed Japanese troops shown in disciplined formation, and Chinese forces typically depicted in retreat or surrender. Heroic individual soldiers and officers are often named in the cartouches, giving the prints the character of illustrated war reportage as much as decorative imagery. Major Sino-Japanese War triptychs by Toshihide are now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other institutions that built war-print collections in the twentieth century.

A decade later, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904, Toshihide returned to the senso-e format, although by then the woodblock medium was in clear decline as a journalistic vehicle, increasingly supplanted by lithography, photography, and the illustrated magazines. His Russo-Japanese War prints depict the naval action off Port Arthur, the torpedo-boat attacks of February 1904, fighting at the Yalu River, and the land operations at Liaoyang and Mukden. They form part of the last great wave of traditional Japanese war prints and are studied today as documents both of late ukiyo-e production and of the visual culture that accompanied Japan's emergence as a modern military power.

Alongside his war prints, Toshihide produced an important body of bijin-ga, including a twelve-part series of beauties in which each figure was set off by subtle seasonal accessories—fans, umbrellas, autumn leaves, snow-bordered kimono. These prints share the elegant Meiji bijin idiom cultivated by contemporaries such as Toyohara Chikanobu. He also produced yakusha-e (kabuki actor prints) and Noh subjects during the late 1890s.

Toshihide's later career shifted increasingly toward nihonga painting and book illustration as the woodblock print industry contracted. He continued to exhibit and to take commissions through the Taisho era, and he was active in the Tokyo art world as a member of artists' associations and as a teacher of younger illustrators. He died in 1925.

For much of the twentieth century, Migita Toshihide was overshadowed in Western collections by the more famous senso-e designers Kobayashi Kiyochika and Ogata Gekko, but renewed scholarship and war-print exhibitions have restored his standing as one of the most prolific and visually inventive war-print designers of the Meiji period. His historical narrative prints have also drawn fresh attention as late examples of the Yoshitoshi school's commitment to legendary and dramatic subjects. Together, his battlefield triptychs, his bijin series, his Noh and kabuki sheets, and his book illustrations document the final flowering of ukiyo-e as it adapted to a Japan that was simultaneously industrializing, modernizing its army and navy, and asserting itself as a major power in East Asia.