Utagawa Yoshitora

Utagawa Yoshitora (歌川芳虎, active c. 1836-1880), who signed many of his prints with the art name Ichimōsai or simply Mōsai (一猛斎・孟斎), was one of the most prolific and worldly designers of the late Utagawa school and a dominant force in the mid-nineteenth-century Yokohama-e genre. The oldest 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, running from the late Edo period into the middle Meiji era, 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 is generally described as his teacher's oldest pupil. His independent streak eventually brought him into conflict with the authorities: in 1849 he designed a satirical warrior print, Dōke musha: Miyo no wakamochi, which the censors construed as a veiled criticism of the shogunal government. He was punished with fifty days in manacles, and soon afterward he left — or was expelled from — Kuniyoshi's studio, an episode some sources connect to the print itself. 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, yakusha-e (actor portraits), and bijin-ga (images of 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 these years include large triptych views of foreign merchants in the settlement, single-sheet portraits of representatives of each foreign nation, and imaginative reconstructions of distant foreign cities such as London and Washington, based on European illustrated newspapers that had reached Japan through Dutch and other channels. A series such as "Complete Enumeration of Scenic Places in Foreign Nations" (Bankoku meisho zukushi no uchi) gave Japanese audiences some of their first popular images of the wider world.

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Yoshitora continued to work prolifically. He produced large color triptychs of the new Meiji modernity — steam locomotives, horse-drawn carriages, gas lighting, brick buildings, telegraph wires, and Western-style ships — that document the rapid technological and architectural transformation of Tokyo and the treaty ports. He also worked as a designer of nishiki-e shimbun (illustrated news prints), a hybrid genre that drew on Yokohama-e visual conventions to deliver sensational news stories — fires, murders, foreign incidents, and diplomatic events — in single-sheet color prints. These early Meiji news prints are an important precursor of modern Japanese journalism and a window onto the visual culture of the first decades after the restoration.

Yoshitora's prints stand today as some of the most vivid documents of Japan's encounter with the modern world. His Yokohama-e remain his most celebrated achievement, but his musha-e, his Meiji modernization prints, and his news prints together make him one of the indispensable late-Utagawa designers. His work is held by major institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago — whose Chadbourne Collection of nineteenth-century Japanese prints, the gift of the collector Emily Crane Chadbourne, includes a substantial group of his designs — as well as the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, and the Library of Congress, among others.