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 active career of his predecessor Torii Kiyomasu I - and modern scholarship has only recently disentangled his output from that of the elder Kiyomasu, with whom he was long conflated.

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. His exact relationship to Kiyomasu I (active c. 1696 - c. 1716) is unresolved: scholars have variously proposed that the two were close relatives, master and pupil, or even a single man working under one name across a long career. What is clear is that he trained within the Torii family workshop in the period when the school was establishing itself as the 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 himself 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 well past the active career of Kiyomasu I - and modern attribution practice now assigns those works to Kiyomasu II.

Kiyomasu II inherited a fully formed Torii school house style from his predecessors: 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), and 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. Modern cataloguing, drawing on scholarship by Richard Lane, Amy Reigle Newland, and others, tends to assign to Kiyomasu II prints that record theatrical performances from the 1720s onward - works that postdate the active career of Kiyomasu I - and this reasoning has reorganised a substantial body of Torii-school yakusha-e under Kiyomasu II's name.

Kiyomasu II's productive career coincided with one of the most fertile periods of Edo kabuki - the era of celebrated onnagata (female-role specialists) and of the Ichikawa Danjuro II line of aragoto actors, who were extending the dramatic vocabulary that the first Danjuro had codified at the turn of the century. The documentary value of the Torii-school actor prints of this period is considerable: they routinely identify the actor, role, play title, theatre, month, and year, allowing modern scholars to reconstruct entire seasonal programmes from the surviving yakusha-e.

Technically, Kiyomasu II worked across the principal print media of his period. His early prints continue the sumizuri-e (black-ink-only) and tan-e (hand-coloured with orange tan pigment, sometimes supplemented with yellow and green) techniques that Kiyomasu I had used. As urushi-e (lacquer prints) emerged in the late 1710s and 1720s - black ink thickened with animal glue and dusted with brass filings or other metallic powders to produce a glossy, deep-toned surface that simulated lacquerware - Kiyomasu II became one of its most prolific practitioners, producing many celebrated hosoban-format yakusha-e in the medium. His later work turned toward the more refined benizuri-e (rose prints with two or three registered colour blocks) that would come to dominate Edo printmaking in the following decades and prepare the way for the full-colour nishiki-e (brocade prints) that emerged in the 1760s, by which time the Torii headship had passed to Torii Kiyomitsu.

Kiyomasu II also worked on the large-format theatrical advertising that was the Torii school's principal business with the Edo theatres. The workshop's billboards (kanban) and printed playbills (banzuke), executed for street display and hand distribution, established conventions for kabuki publicity that persisted across the eighteenth century - a different and arguably more demanding format than the standard hosoban actor print.

The historical confusion between Kiyomasu I and Kiyomasu II has its origins in the workshop practice of treating the Torii name as a family identifier rather than as a personal mark. Both artists signed their work simply 'Torii Kiyomasu' or 'Kiyomasu', and Edo collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appear to have made little distinction between the generations. The first systematic catalogues of Japanese woodblock prints in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and America followed the same convention, listing all prints signed Kiyomasu under a single artist heading regardless of the date of theatrical performance recorded on the sheet. The result, by the middle of the twentieth century, was a corpus that included works spanning more than four decades under a single name, an obvious impossibility once the dates were taken seriously. Modern scholarship, from Richard Lane in the 1970s through Amy Reigle Newland's 2005 Hotei encyclopedia of ukiyo-e, has gradually disentangled the two generations, with the result that most major museum collections now distinguish Kiyomasu I (active c. 1696 - c. 1716) from Kiyomasu II, assigning the later body of work to the second-generation artist.

Kiyomasu II's place within the Torii school's institutional history sits between the founding generation - Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I - and the mid-century generations that would carry the school's practice through the technical revolution from monochrome and hand-coloured prints into full-colour nishiki-e. He was the contemporary of Torii Kiyonobu II (active c. 1725 - c. 1761), who is generally identified as the second head of the Torii school after Kiyonobu I, and Kiyomasu II appears to have worked within the same workshop without ever holding the formal headship. The headship passed instead through the Kiyonobu line to Torii Kiyomitsu (1735-1785), who as third head of the school presided over the benizuri-e and early nishiki-e periods and trained Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815) as his successor. Kiyomasu II's prints thus belong to the second generation of Torii school production, the bridge between the muscular early-Edo style codified by Kiyonobu I and Kiyomasu I and the more refined mid-Edo work of Kiyomitsu and Kiyonaga.

Kiyomasu II died in 1763. His prints survive today in the Art Institute of Chicago - whose Clarence Buckingham Collection of Japanese woodblock prints includes one of the most thorough holdings of his work outside Japan - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, among other major institutions. The prints constitute one of the most thorough pictorial records of any quarter-century of Edo kabuki, documenting plays, actors, theatres, and theatrical seasons with a precision that few other sources match. Their relatively recent reattribution from Kiyomasu I to Kiyomasu II reflects both the maturity of modern ukiyo-e scholarship and the inherently collaborative, multigenerational character of Torii-school workshop production - a model in which individual artistic identities were subordinated to the family enterprise of supplying Edo's licensed kabuki theatres with their publicity material across the long eighteenth century.