Okumura Masanobu

Okumura Masanobu (1686-1764) was one of the most inventive and commercially shrewd figures of early ukiyo-e, an artist who simultaneously redrew the design vocabulary of the Japanese woodblock print and rebuilt the publishing industry through which it circulated. Active in Edo for nearly six decades, he apprenticed in a world of black-ink sumizuri-e and lived long enough to see his own studio produce the two-color benizuri-e prints that led, in the hands of his younger contemporary Suzuki Harunobu, to the full-color nishiki-e revolution of 1765. Almost every important innovation of pre-Harunobu ukiyo-e bears Masanobu's fingerprints, as inventor, popularizer, or aggressive commercial promoter.

Born in Edo in 1686, very likely into a townsman family connected to the print and bookselling trades, Masanobu was largely self-taught as a designer, though he absorbed deeply the figural manner of Torii Kiyonobu and Kiyomasu, whose bold, calligraphic line dominated early-eighteenth-century yakusha-e. His earliest signed prints date to about 1700, when he was still a teenager. By the 1710s he was producing oban sumizuri-e prints of beauties, kabuki actors, and classical literary subjects with a confidence that placed him among the most ambitious designers of his generation, alongside Nishikawa Sukenobu and Okumura Toshinobu, his probable adopted son and studio successor.

His most distinctive achievement was that he established his own publishing house, the Okumuraya, which by the 1720s was one of the most aggressive and innovative print publishers in Edo. The Okumuraya gave him what almost no other designer of his era possessed: complete editorial and commercial control, from drawing through block-cutting, printing, and marketing. He used that independence to launch format innovations that defined the visual culture of mid-eighteenth-century Edo. He was the central popularizer, traditionally credited as inventor, of the hashira-e or pillar print, the tall narrow vertical format pasted on the wooden pillars of Edo townhouse interiors. He pioneered the uki-e or floating picture, the perspective view that adapted Western linear perspective, transmitted through Chinese intermediaries and Dutch optical prints, to kabuki theatre interiors and Edo cityscapes; his uki-e of the Nakamura Theatre and Ryogoku Bridge established the genre that Toyoharu and later Hokusai would extend. He was among the first to produce benizuri-e, the two- and three-color prints registered from multiple blocks using pink (beni) and green pigments, which between roughly 1745 and 1765 served as the technical bridge between hand-colored urushi-e and polychrome nishiki-e. He developed the triptych and large diptych as standard publishing products, and refined the lacquered urushi-e finish in which boiled animal glue thickens the ink to produce a glossy black surface enriched with brass filings for a metallic shimmer.

His subject matter spanned the ukiyo-e repertoire. He produced extensive yakusha-e of the Ichikawa and Sanogawa lines, including iconic images of Ichikawa Ebizo I and II in signature roles such as Sukeroku and Yanone Goro. His bijin-ga of Yoshiwara courtesans, often in monumental o-oban format with elaborate hand-coloring, helped define the early-eighteenth-century image of the courtesan as cultural icon. His mitate or parody prints reimagined classical literary, Buddhist, and Daoist subjects in contemporary dress, treating courtesans as the Chinese sage Zhang Guolao or staging The Tale of Genji as Yoshiwara theatre. He produced shunga, kacho-ga, and kabuki parodies in enormous quantities.