Utagawa Yoshimori

Utagawa Yoshimori (歌川芳盛, 1830-1884), born Taguchi Tashichi and also known by the gō Ippōsai, was a Japanese woodblock print designer of the late Edo and early Meiji periods whose career bridged the warrior-print (musha-e) tradition of his teacher Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the documentary spectacle of Bakumatsu Yokohama-e, and the new world of Meiji journalistic printing that followed the Restoration of 1868. With fellow Kuniyoshi pupils Yoshitora, Yoshikazu, Yoshitoshi, Yoshiiku, and Yoshifuji, he belongs to the remarkable last generation of the Utagawa school — the artists who carried Edo-period print culture across the threshold into modern Japan.

Born in Edo in 1830, Yoshimori entered the studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) in his teens or early twenties, receiving the Yoshi character from his master's name in the standard Utagawa-school convention. Kuniyoshi was at the height of his powers as the principal designer of warrior prints in the city, and his studio produced a remarkable group of pupils whose names — all beginning with Yoshi — would dominate Edo print publishing for the next two decades. Yoshimori's earliest signed works date from around 1850 and include warrior prints in the Kuniyoshi tradition: scenes from the Taiheiki, the Genpei wars, and the legendary repertoire of heroic combat his teacher had made his own. The rich palette, energetic figural drawing, and dense decorative armor of these early musha-e place him firmly within Kuniyoshi's stylistic orbit.

The opening of Yokohama as a treaty port in July 1859, following the Harris Treaty of 1858, transformed Edo publishing. Workshops rushed to satisfy public appetite for prints of the foreigners, ships, and technologies that had arrived on Japanese shores, and the brief but intense genre of Yokohama-e flourished from around 1860 to 1862. Yoshimori was one of its principal designers alongside Yoshikazu, Yoshitora, and Yoshitoshi. His 1860 Yokohama-e — the diptych A Glance at Miyosaki, Yokohama; Englishmen: One Standing, One Sketching; Foreigners in Miyozaki-chō; and the ōban from the series Five Nations devoted to America — set foreign figures against the new topography of the treaty port and offered Japanese viewers a stylized but carefully observed encyclopedia of Western dress and behavior. The Met preserves Yoshimori's Portrait of Okichi, a single-sheet image of Saitō Kichi ("Tōjin Okichi"), the woman from Shimoda assigned by the Tokugawa authorities to serve in the household of the first American consul Townsend Harris and later mythologized as a casualty of the Bakumatsu encounter with the West. His Dutchwoman with Leopard, from the series Pictures of Birds and Animals (Chōjū zue), shows the documentary-fantastical mode characteristic of Yokohama-e at its most inventive.

When the brief peak of Yokohama-e production subsided after 1862, Yoshimori turned to other genres. His 1863 View of the Large Imported Elephant records the public exhibition of a live elephant imported through Yokohama in Bunkyū 3, and his 1862 memorial portrait (shini-e) of the kabuki actor Kataoka Nizaemon VIII shows his command of the yakusha-e tradition. He also produced musha-e, landscape prints, and book illustrations through the final Tokugawa years.