Ochiai Yoshiiku

Ochiai Yoshiiku (落合芳幾, 1833-1904), who signed many of his works as Utagawa Yoshiiku (歌川芳幾), was one of the senior pupils of Utagawa Kuniyoshi and one of the most prolific designers active at the seam between late-Edo and early-Meiji ukiyo-e. His career spanned the Yokohama-e (pictures of foreigners) of the early 1860s, the late Edo actor print, the bloody musha-e and shini-e of the 1860s, the founding of the nishiki-e shimbun (color-print newspapers) of the 1870s, and a long final phase as an illustrator for major Meiji-period dailies and serialized novels. He is now studied as one of the central documentarians of the visual culture of bakumatsu and early Meiji Tokyo, and as one of the figures who, alongside his classmate Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, carried the Utagawa school's habits of design into the radically changed conditions of the post-Restoration print market.

Yoshiiku was born in Edo in Tenpō 4 (1833), the son, by most traditional accounts, of a teahouse proprietor in the Asakusa district — a neighborhood whose theaters, pleasure quarters, and seasonal markets supplied the central subjects of Edo popular print culture. He entered Utagawa Kuniyoshi's studio in the late 1840s or early 1850s, in the same cohort that produced Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), Yoshikazu, and Yoshitora, and absorbed Kuniyoshi's blend of musha-e dynamism, intense character work, and willingness to push the technical limits of the multi-block color print. Like other Kuniyoshi pupils, he received the art name Yoshi- (芳) from his master in token of the lineage, signing most of his early prints simply as Yoshiiku (芳幾) or Ikkeisai Yoshiiku and only later in his career adopting the family name Ochiai under which he is now indexed.

The first phase of Yoshiiku's career was dominated by the actor print and by the Yokohama-e boom that followed the opening of the treaty port at Yokohama in 1859. Working primarily for Edo publishers, he designed numerous oban triptychs depicting foreigners — Americans, Dutch, British, French, and Russians — in the Gankirō teahouse, in trading firms, in their houses and stables, and at leisure. His Picture of a Banquet of People of Five Nations at the Gankirō Teahouse (Gokakoku gankirō ni oite sakamori no zu, 1860, AIC) is among the most often-reproduced single sheets of the Yokohama-e genre; the related triptychs Picture of Men and Women from Many Countries and Foreign Words (Ikoku kotoba) belong to the same intensive production of 1860-1861. The Yokohama prints are now valued both for the visual exoticism of their costumes and ships and for what they reveal about how Edo townspeople imagined the foreigners they had begun to encounter directly in trade. In parallel, Yoshiiku produced actor prints in the late Edo manner for major Edo theaters, contributing to the bust and full-length okubi-e series of the 1860s and to the kabuki ghost-and-blood imagery in which his master Kuniyoshi had specialized. His Memorial Portrait of the Artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1861, AIC), printed shortly after Kuniyoshi's death, is one of a small group of shini-e (memorial prints) by the senior Kuniyoshi pupils that record the studio's loss.