Utagawa Yoshiharu

Utagawa Yoshiharu (歌川芳春, 1828-1888), who signed his prints with art names including Ichibaisai (一梅斎) and Baisō (梅窓), was a mid-nineteenth-century Edo woodblock print designer of the Utagawa school, best remembered today as a pupil of the great Utagawa Kuniyoshi and as a prolific designer of actor prints, warrior prints, comic compositions, and the new Yokohama-e and kaika-e genres that emerged at the end of the Edo period and into the early Meiji era. He belonged to the densely populated second generation of Kuniyoshi pupils who carried that master's style into the upheavals of the Bakumatsu and Restoration years, and his career documents the transformation of Edo print culture from samurai-era yakusha-e and musha-e into the more topical, news-oriented commercial imagery that defined Japanese prints in the 1860s and 1870s.

Yoshiharu was born in Edo in 1828 and entered the studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) at some point in the 1840s, taking the gō Yoshiharu in keeping with the Utagawa school convention by which pupils received a character from the master's name. Kuniyoshi's studio was one of the most productive in Edo at mid-century, and Yoshiharu studied there alongside the other better-known Yoshi-pupils, including Yoshitoshi, Yoshiiku, Yoshikazu, Yoshifuji, and Yoshitora. Reference works such as Laurance Roberts' Dictionary of Japanese Artists also note that Yoshiharu had earlier training under Yanagawa Shigenobu II before joining Kuniyoshi, an unusual combined pedigree that accounts for the breadth of subjects he later attempted.

From the mid-1850s, Yoshiharu produced a steady output of single-sheet prints and series in the established Utagawa idioms. He designed musha-e (warrior prints) in series such as "Famous Warriors in Combat" (Buyū kōmei kumiuchi soroe) and "Mirror of Heroes of the Shuihuzhuan," working from the Chinese and Japanese military-romance tradition that Kuniyoshi had transformed into one of the most commercially successful print genres of the 1840s and 1850s. He produced yakusha-e (actor prints) for the Edo kabuki stage, mitate (visual parodies), and bijinga (pictures of beautiful women). A substantial 1857 series of prints documents the Osaka acrobat Hayatake Torakichi, who toured Edo that summer and became a popular subject; Yoshiharu's prints of Torakichi spinning tops at Ryōgoku and performing balancing feats beneath cherry trees, today held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are among his most recognizable works and exemplify the close engagement of Utagawa-school designers with the celebrity entertainments of late-Edo Edo.

During the 1860s, Yoshiharu's practice expanded into the new commercial genres that emerged in response to the opening of Japan to the West. He produced Yokohama-e (Yokohama pictures) documenting the foreigners, ships, and exotic novelties that arrived at the treaty port from 1859 onward, and contributed to the boom in topical news prints that accompanied the political turbulence of the Bakumatsu years. His 1863 triptych "The Great Elephant from a Foreign Land" (Ikoku watari dai zō no zu), today held by the Art Institute of Chicago, is a striking example of this genre: it depicts a live elephant brought to Japan as a foreign curiosity, the kind of imported spectacle that fed Edo's appetite for sensational news. He also designed kaika-e ("enlightenment pictures") in the early Meiji period, prints celebrating the new institutions, fashions, and technologies of Westernizing Japan.