Torii Kiyomasu II

Torii Kiyomasu II (二代鳥居清倍, 1706-1763) was the second-generation bearer of the Kiyomasu name within the Torii school of ukiyo-e and one of the central designers of theatrical publicity for the licensed Edo kabuki theatres during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. He is the artist behind a large body of prints traditionally catalogued under the name Kiyomasu - prints whose dates of theatrical performance extend through the 1720s, 1730s, and into the 1740s, well past the death of his predecessor Torii Kiyomasu I - and modern scholarship has only recently disentangled his career from that of the elder Kiyomasu, with whom he was conflated for nearly two centuries.

The biographical record of Kiyomasu II remains thin, as is typical for early eighteenth-century Edo print designers, whose lives left few documentary traces outside their signed work and the surviving registers of the theatrical districts. He is generally accepted by modern scholars to have been the son of Kiyomasu I (active c. 1696 - c. 1716), trained inside the Torii family workshop in the same period that the school was establishing itself as the official designer of kabuki publicity for the three licensed Edo theatres - the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, and Morita-za. The exact lineage relationships across the founding generations of the Torii school remain disputed: Kiyomasu I has been variously identified as the younger brother, the son, or the close collaborator of the school's founder Torii Kiyonobu I (1664-1729), and Kiyomasu II's own position within that web of names was similarly fluid through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is clear from the surviving prints and the documentary record of Edo theatrical productions is that someone working under the Kiyomasu name continued to design actor prints, theatre billboards (kanban), and printed playbills (banzuke) for the Edo theatres through the 1720s, 1730s, and early 1740s - a period when Kiyomasu I was demonstrably no longer alive - and modern attribution practice now assigns those works to Kiyomasu II.

Kiyomasu II inherited a fully formed Torii school house style from his predecessor: the heavy, swelling contour line known among Edo connoisseurs as mimizu-gaki (the 'earthworm line'), the muscular bowed-leg stance called hyotan-ashi (the 'gourd-leg' pose), the aggressive frontal compositions developed for hyper-visibility on the kanban billboards displayed outside the theatres. These conventions had been calibrated by Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I for the requirements of theatrical advertising, where a print or painted billboard had to register at distance from the street and convey the bombast of the aragoto (rough-business) style for which the Ichikawa Danjuro line of actors was famous. Kiyomasu II continued the style with only modest modifications, and the continuity is so close that connoisseurs have long had difficulty separating his hand from his predecessor's - a difficulty compounded by the workshop practice of signing prints with the family name 'Torii Kiyomasu' rather than with personal-generation differentiations. The Art Institute of Chicago, working from accumulated scholarship by Lane, Newland, and others, has formally adopted the practice of attributing to Kiyomasu II any print bearing a date of theatrical performance after the early 1720s, on the principle that Kiyomasu I had by then died and could not have designed them. This curatorial decision has reorganised a substantial body of Torii-school yakusha-e under Kiyomasu II's name, including some of the most documentary actor prints of the second quarter of the eighteenth century.