Toyohara Chikayoshi

Toyohara Chikayoshi (豊原周美) was a Meiji-era woodblock print designer active in Tokyo during the 1870s and 1880s, distinguished as the one female pupil of Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), the leading actor-print designer of the early Meiji period. With whom she also reportedly shared a personal partnership in his later years. Her surviving prints, signed Chikayoshi or Toyohara Chikayoshi, place her firmly within the late Utagawa school lineage that dominated commercial print publishing in the new capital after the Meiji Restoration, and her output centers on the two genres that defined her teacher's market: yakusha-e (kabuki actor prints) and fūzoku-ga (scenes of contemporary customs and manners), produced in the standard ōban triptych and pentaptych formats that Tokyo publishers issued throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

Biographical details for Chikayoshi remain sparse — her birth and death dates have not been recovered, and she does not appear in the principal Meiji-period print-designer reference works compiled by Kojima Usui or in the early twentieth-century survey biographies that established the modern canon. What is known of her is reconstructed from the small body of signed prints that survive in public and private collections: the Edo-Tokyo Museum holds four sheets from a Twelve Views of Tokyo series and a Chūshingura design under her name; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston preserves a single bijin-ga of a woman in a boat under a full moon dated 1871; and a triptych of cherry-blossom viewing in Ueno Park published by Asano Eizō in the early 1880s circulates regularly through Western dealers. Together these works document a designer who moved easily between the actor and beauty genres, was published by mid-tier Tokyo houses, and worked in the period when chromatic experimentation in red and aniline pigments was reshaping the visual register of Meiji prints.

Chikayoshi's place in the Utagawa school must be understood against the unusual position women occupied within commercial print publishing in nineteenth-century Japan. Female designers were exceedingly rare in the Edo period — Katsushika Ōi, the daughter of Hokusai, is the principal celebrated exception — and remained so through the Meiji era despite the general expansion of women's roles in education, illustration, and the professions. Within the late Utagawa lineage descended from Toyokuni I, the small handful of female pupils whose names are recorded (Chikayoshi, Yamada Tatsu working as Yamada Hōgyoku, and a few others working under Kunichika and Kunisada) have until recently received only marginal scholarly attention. The recent revival of interest in Meiji-period women artists, driven both by feminist art history and by the broader reassessment of the Utagawa school as a collective workshop tradition, has begun to recover their work, and Chikayoshi's prints are now occasionally exhibited as examples of the school's accommodation of women practitioners.

Stylistically, Chikayoshi's signed prints follow the late Kunichika idiom with considerable fidelity: dense compositions filled with named kabuki figures or fashionable contemporary women, strong outlines in heavy black keyblock, saturated reds and purples characteristic of the 1870s Meiji palette, and the elongated tate-e or oban triptych formats that the Tokyo publishers favored for theatrical and seasonal subjects. The Twelve Views of Tokyo set held at the Edo-Tokyo Museum places her work within the topographical-and-seasonal tradition that ran continuously from Hokusai and Hiroshige through Kunichika and his pupils, applying their stock motifs — irises at the Yoshiwara, chrysanthemums at Sugamo, the riverside at Somei — to the rapidly modernizing landscape of early Meiji Tokyo. Her 1871 bijin-ga in Boston, Woman in Boat under Full Moon, is more reserved in tone and shows her facility with the late ukiyo-e mood-piece tradition, a quieter register that she also drew upon for the Ueno cherry-blossom triptych later in her career.