Torii Kiyomine

Torii Kiyomine (鳥居清峰, 1787-1868) - who from 1815 onward signed his work as Torii Kiyomitsu II (二代目鳥居清満) and served as the fifth head of the Torii school of ukiyo-e - was the late-Edo descendant of the workshop that, more than a century earlier, his lineal forebears had established as the official designer of pictorial publicity for the three licensed Edo kabuki theatres. His career spans the early nineteenth century, a period in which the Torii family's dominance over Edo actor prints was slowly eroded by the rise of the Utagawa school, and his work documents the gradual transition of the family workshop from leading designer of yakusha-e into a residual role as supplier of kabuki billboards and theatre programs.

Kiyomine was born in 1787 into the Torii lineage that descended from the school's founder Torii Kiyonobu I (active around 1700) through Torii Kiyomasu I and Torii Kiyomitsu I (1735-1785), the third head whose career spanned the transition from benizuri-e to full-colour nishiki-e. Kiyomitsu I's pupil and successor as fourth head was Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815), the great bijin-ga designer whose tall, statuesque beauties had defined the dominant style of the 1780s. Kiyomine entered the school as Kiyonaga's pupil and began signing prints around 1797-1800 as Torii Kiyomine. His early signed work falls within the late phase of Kiyonaga's career, when the Torii workshop was already losing its grip on the broader Edo actor-print market to the new generation of Utagawa designers - Toyokuni I, Toyokuni II, and the young Kunisada - whose more dramatically gestural yakusha-e were displacing the older Torii formula.

Through the first decade of the nineteenth century Kiyomine produced bijin-ga and yakusha-e signed with the Kiyomine name in the oban format that had become standard for ambitious Edo prints. His beautiful-women prints inherited the elongated proportions and elegant standing poses of his master Kiyonaga while showing the more decorative tendencies of late-Bunka bijin-ga. The Art Institute of Chicago's Beauty applying rouge from the series Comparison of Beauties in Eastern Brocade (Azuma nishiki bijin awase), c. 1804-1810, is representative. Yakusha-e signed Kiyomine in this period continue the Torii actor-print tradition: the 1812 Chicago print of Ichikawa Danjuro I and Yamanaka Heikuro I, signed "ganso Torii Kiyonobu su, mio godaime Kiyomine ga" (invoking both Kiyonobu I and the artist's status as fifth-generation Kiyomine), is an explicit assertion of dynastic continuity in the face of mounting Utagawa competition.

In 1815 - on the death of Torii Kiyonaga - Kiyomine succeeded as fifth head of the Torii school and assumed the studio name Torii Kiyomitsu II. From that point onward his signed work uses the name Kiyomitsu rather than Kiyomine, often as "godaime Torii Kiyomitsu hitsu" ("fifth generation Torii Kiyomitsu painted this"). By the 1820s and 1830s, the broader Edo actor-print market was dominated by Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), and Kiyomitsu II's signed yakusha-e of this period are sparse. The Torii workshop concentrated instead on the residual but contractually secured role of designing kabuki billboards, banzuke programs, and large-format announcement sheets for the three licensed Edo theatres - the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, and Morita-za - with which the Torii school had held exclusive contracts since the late seventeenth century.