Torii Kiyoshige

Torii Kiyoshige (鳥居清重, active c. 1728-1763) was an Edo ukiyo-e designer of the Torii school, the workshop that held the exclusive contract to design billboards, programs, and actor prints for the three licensed Edo kabuki theatres throughout the eighteenth century. He worked across the central decades of the school's mid-Edo phase, producing yakusha-e (actor pictures) that document the careers of the leading Edo performers of the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s, and his prints span the technical transition from hand-coloured urushi-e (lacquer prints) and beni-e to the registered two- and three-block benizuri-e that became standard in Edo printmaking from the late 1740s onward.

Nothing reliable is recorded of Kiyoshige's birth or death dates, and the Torii genealogy preserves no clear account of his relationship to the headship of the school. Modern museum records date his active period to approximately 1728-1763, placing him as a contemporary of Torii Kiyonobu II and Torii Kiyomasu II - the second-generation heads of the Torii line under whom the school maintained its theatrical monopoly through the middle decades of the eighteenth century. He appears to have worked as one of the secondary designers of the workshop rather than as its principal, supplying actor prints alongside the more prolific Kiyonobu II and Kiyomasu II output and continuing to produce signed work into the early years of Torii Kiyomitsu's headship of the school after 1755.

Kiyoshige's signed prints are almost exclusively yakusha-e in the narrow vertical hosoban format that the Torii workshop had codified as the standard sheet for single-figure actor compositions. His earlier prints of the 1730s use the hand-coloured urushi-e technique - black-line woodblock impressions to which colour was applied by hand, often with the addition of glue or lacquer to produce the deep glossy black for which the urushi-e style is named - while his prints of the late 1740s and the 1750s move into the benizuri-e palette of registered pink and green that defined the Edo print trade in the years before Suzuki Harunobu's full-colour nishiki-e revolution of the mid-1760s. He also designed a small number of habahiro hashira-e (wide pillar prints), an unusual variant of the standard narrow hashira-e format in which a wider sheet allowed a slightly more substantial figural composition while preserving the vertical orientation suited to display on the wooden posts of an Edo townhouse interior.

Kiyoshige's surviving body of work documents the stage careers of central Edo actors of his generation - Sanogawa Mangiku I, Sawamura Sojuro I and II, Matsumoto Koshiro II, Sanogawa Ichimatsu I, Anegawa Shinshiro I, the early Segawa Kikunojo I, and Nakamura Sukegoro I - in performances at the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za, and Morita-za through three decades of mid-eighteenth-century Edo kabuki. The level of theatrical documentation characteristic of Torii-school yakusha-e in this period, recording actor, role, play, theatre, month, and year in many of the signed prints, makes Kiyoshige's surviving work an important pictorial record of the Edo theatrical calendar across these decades.