Utagawa Toyoharu

Utagawa Toyoharu (c. 1735-1814) was the founder of the Utagawa school, the dynasty of Edo ukiyo-e designers that would come to dominate Japanese woodblock prints throughout the nineteenth century. While his own surviving output is modest compared with that of his pupils, his historical importance is enormous: he gave Japan its single largest and longest-lasting print lineage, and he is the artist most responsible for translating European perspective into a fluent Edo idiom through the genre known as uki-e, or 'floating pictures.'

Toyoharu was born around 1735, traditionally in Tajima Province (modern Hyogo Prefecture), and made his way to Edo while still young. His training followed the pattern common to ambitious Edo artists of the mid-eighteenth century: he is reported to have studied first within the orbit of the Kano school, the official painting academy of the Tokugawa shogunate, and then with Toriyama Sekien, the eccentric scholar-painter best known today as the teacher of Kitagawa Utamaro and as the compiler of the illustrated yokai catalogues. Through Sekien, Toyoharu absorbed both the discipline of brush painting and a curiosity about pictorial systems that lay outside the conservative Kano canon, including the techniques being imported by way of Dutch books at Nagasaki.

By the 1760s Toyoharu had emerged in the Edo print market under the Utagawa name, taking the studio designation that would become the most recognizable brand in nineteenth-century ukiyo-e. The Edo ukiyo-e world he entered was in transition. The full-color nishiki-e print had just been perfected by Suzuki Harunobu and his collaborators in 1765, and the appetite of urban customers for new visual experiences was sharper than at any time since the form's beginnings. Toyoharu seized on one of the most novel of those experiences: linear perspective. Japanese artists had been experimenting since the early eighteenth century with megane-e, or 'spectacle pictures,' meant to be viewed through optical devices that produced a heightened sense of depth, and with the related uki-e tradition pioneered by Okumura Masanobu and Utagawa Toyonobu. Toyoharu pushed this experiment further than anyone before him.

His uki-e prints set Edo theatres, Yoshiwara reception rooms, famous scenic spots, and even imagined foreign cities into convincing recessions of orthogonals and vanishing points. He published whole series under titles such as 'Dutch Perspective Pictures' (Oranda uki-e) and 'Newly Published Perspective Pictures' (Shinpan uki-e), advertising the European source of his method openly to a fashion-conscious public. He produced views of Mount Fuji from Tagonoura, of Shinobazu Pond, of the kabuki theatres of Sakai-cho and Fukiya-cho, and of the great river-opening festivals at Ryogoku, all organised by a perspective grid that was unusual in Japanese painting up to that moment. Most strikingly, he adapted etched copperplate views of European cities directly into ukiyo-e: surviving prints by Toyoharu depict Roman ruins and the Forum, almost certainly worked up from imported prints by artists such as Giuseppe Vasi or Giovanni Battista Piranesi. These pictures sit at the cosmopolitan edge of the Edo print, and they are some of the earliest direct visual quotations from European art to be marketed openly to Japanese audiences.