Torii Kiyoharu

Torii Kiyoharu (鳥居清春, active circa 1704-1740s) is an early-eighteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e designer whose surviving prints document a brief affiliation with the Torii school during the urushi-e era and whose career is, in much of the modern scholarly literature, treated as overlapping with that of the designer signing as Kondō Kiyoharu (近藤清春). The dual attribution arises from the practice, common among second-generation Edo ukiyo-e designers, of working under more than one surname during a career - in this case the Torii name during a period of association with the workshop of Torii Kiyonobu I (1664-1729) and the Kondō name during his independent later years. Major Western collections including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, the British Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago catalog the surviving body of work variously as Torii Kiyoharu, Kondō Kiyoharu, and occasionally Hishikawa Kiyoharu, reflecting the unsettled state of the period attribution; the catalog entries of Richard Lane's 1978 Images from the Floating World identify the Torii-signed sheets specifically as the products of Kiyoharu's earlier workshop period.

Kiyoharu belongs to the generation of Edo ukiyo-e designers who came of age in the decade after Hishikawa Moronobu's death in 1694 and who worked through the Shōtoku (1711-1716) and early Kyōhō (1716-1736) eras to consolidate the urushi-e print as the dominant Edo format. The urushi-e, or lacquer print, was built from a black-line woodblock impression hand-coloured with safflower-derived beni pink, ochres, and yellows, with selectively applied glossy black accents - bone-glue mixed into the ink to imitate the sheen of lacquer - on obi sashes, hair, and headdresses. Kiyoharu was an accomplished practitioner of the mode, and his surviving sheets in the major collections are catalogued almost without exception as hand-coloured woodblock prints in the urushi-e manner, often on the narrow vertical hosoban sheet that became the standard Torii-school yakusha-e format of the 1710s and 1720s.

The surviving Kiyoharu corpus divides between the actor portraits typical of the Torii school's workshop production and a smaller body of historical, didactic, and devotional subjects that distinguishes him from his more strictly theatrical contemporaries. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston preserves at least four signed sheets of actor prints depicting performers of the Edo kabuki stage - among them a portrait of Ichikawa Monnosuke I as a flower vendor, a double portrait of Sanjō Kantarō with Yamashita Kamematsu in a domestic kabuki scene, and a group composition of actors arrayed in a pleasure barge on the river. These sheets document the actor-portrait business of the Torii workshop during the years when Kiyonobu I and his immediate successors held the contract to design publicity billboards and illustrated programs for the three licensed Edo theaters - the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, and Morita-za. Beyond the world of yakusha-e, the Harvard Art Museums hold a pair of urushi-e sheets illustrating the Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety (Nijūshikō), the canonical Confucian-Buddhist anthology of moral exemplars that had been a staple of East Asian didactic literature since the Yuan dynasty. Kiyoharu's adaptation of the Paragons to the early Edo single-sheet print represents one of the period's distinctive experiments in extending the new popular medium beyond kabuki and Yoshiwara subjects into the territory of moral and devotional iconography.