Utagawa Yoshitora

Utagawa Yoshitora (歌川芳虎, active c. 1836-1887), who signed many of his prints with the art name Ichimōsai or simply Mōsai (一鵬齋・孟齋), was one of the most prolific and worldly designers of the late Utagawa school and the dominant force in the mid-nineteenth-century Yokohama-e genre. A senior pupil of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), Yoshitora bridged the late Edo tradition of warrior prints (musha-e) and kabuki imagery and the new Meiji-era visual culture of foreign trade, steam technology, and illustrated journalism. His career, spanning more than half a century from the late Tenpō era through the middle Meiji period, documents Japan's tumultuous transition from a closed shogunal state to a treaty-bound nation engaging with the wider world.

Yoshitora entered Kuniyoshi's studio in the 1830s and was reportedly one of his teacher's earliest and most independently minded students. Tradition holds that he was expelled or estranged from the studio at some point because he refused to defer to his master's preferences, an episode that says less about Yoshitora's character than about the highly competitive economy of Edo print designers in the mid-nineteenth century. He nonetheless retained the Utagawa lineage signature and continued to work within the Kuniyoshi idiom of dynamic warrior compositions, supernatural subjects, and energetic figure drawing well into the Bakumatsu years.

During the 1840s and 1850s Yoshitora was active across the standard Edo print genres. He produced musha-e (warrior prints) drawing on the war chronicles and historical romances popular in the period, sumo prints, yakusha-e (actor portraits), and bijin-ga (beautiful women). The Tenpō reforms of 1841-1843 had restricted depictions of contemporary actors and courtesans, and like other Kuniyoshi pupils Yoshitora became adept at coding contemporary references into ostensibly historical subjects. His warrior prints of this period are characterized by the powerful diagonal compositions, exaggerated musculature, and decorative armor patterning that defined the late Utagawa musha-e tradition.

The opening of the treaty ports in 1859 transformed Yoshitora's career. Yokohama, established as a foreign settlement adjacent to Edo, suddenly offered a sustained spectacle of foreigners — American, British, Dutch, French, Russian, and Chinese merchants, sailors, and diplomats living in a purpose-built international quarter. Edo print publishers responded with an entirely new genre, Yokohama-e ("Yokohama pictures"), depicting these foreigners and their architecture, ships, costumes, and customs to satisfy the enormous curiosity of the Japanese public. Yoshitora became the most prolific designer of Yokohama-e of the early 1860s. His prints from 1860-1862 include large triptych views of foreign merchants in the settlement, single-sheet portraits of representatives of each foreign nation, and imaginative reconstructions of Western cities such as London and Paris based on European illustrated newspapers that had reached Edo through Dutch and other channels. Series such as "A Collection of Various Countries" (Bankoku zukushi), "People of the Five Nations" (Gokakoku jinbutsu zue), and "Collection of Scenic Places in Foreign Lands" gave Japanese audiences their first popular images of the wider world.