Utagawa Yoshitoyo

Utagawa Yoshitoyo (歌川芳豊, 1830-1866), who also signed his prints with the art name Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo (一龍齋芳豊), was a pupil of the great late-Edo print master Utagawa Kuniyoshi and one of the most prolific designers of Yokohama-e and misemono-e during the brief but momentous years following the forced opening of Japan to foreign trade in the 1850s and 1860s. Although his career was cut short by his death at the age of thirty-six, Yoshitoyo's prints are now important historical documents of the Japanese encounter with Westerners and exotic imports during the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, and surviving examples are held by museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Born in 1830, Yoshitoyo entered the Edo studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), one of the dominant figures of late ukiyo-e and the leading designer of warrior prints (musha-e), animal pictures, and the satirical compositions that flourished under the censorship of the Tenpō Reforms. The Kuniyoshi studio trained dozens of pupils whose names typically began with the character Yoshi (芳), including such important late-period designers as Yoshitora, Yoshikazu, Yoshifuji, Yoshiiku, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Yoshitoyo was one of the most active of this group during the late 1850s and early 1860s, working alongside his fellow Yoshi-pupils in the same urban print market and frequently treating the same subjects. After Kuniyoshi's death in 1861 Yoshitoyo continued working independently until his own early death in 1866, on the very eve of the Meiji Restoration.

The historical context that shaped Yoshitoyo's brief career was extraordinary. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry's American warships forced the opening of Japanese ports, and by 1859 the treaty port of Yokohama had been established for foreign residence and trade. The arrival of Americans, British, Dutch, French, and Russians on Japanese soil after more than two centuries of seclusion provoked intense public curiosity, and Edo publishers responded with a new genre of woodblock prints known as Yokohama-e, depicting foreigners, their ships, their clothing, their wives, their entertainments, and their cultural customs. Yoshitoyo, together with Yoshikazu, Yoshitora, and Sadahide, was a leading designer of Yokohama-e between 1860 and 1862, when the genre flourished most intensely. He produced single-sheet portraits of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Americans, and Russians, often with explanatory cartouches identifying the nationality and customs of the figure depicted, and aimed at an Edo audience hungry to see what these strangers actually looked like.

A closely related genre at which Yoshitoyo excelled was misemono-e, prints depicting the spectacular public attractions that flourished in the late Edo entertainment districts. The single most celebrated example is the great elephant exhibition of 1863, when an imported Indian elephant was put on public display at Ryōgoku Hirokōji in Edo and drew enormous crowds. Yoshitoyo's elephant prints, among them the diptych 'Recently Imported Big Elephant' and the single sheet 'Picture of an Elephant Born in Maruka in Central India' — both now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — document the event with the same combination of journalistic observation and exotic showmanship that characterizes his Yokohama-e.

Stylistically Yoshitoyo worked in the standard Edo Utagawa-school manner of his master Kuniyoshi: bold outline, vibrant full-color printing (nishiki-e), the ōban format that had become standard in the late Edo period, and dense compositional packing of figures and inscriptions. His prints are signed Ichiryūsai Yoshitoyo (一龍齋芳豊), 'Ichiryūsai' being a fanciful art name (gō) of the sort cultivated by Utagawa pupils to distinguish themselves within the school. The dating of his Yokohama-e and misemono-e is often precise because Tokugawa censorship required published prints to carry seals indicating the date and publisher; surviving Yoshitoyo prints can therefore be assigned to specific months in the early 1860s, and they document the rapid evolution of the public Japanese response to the foreign presence at Yokohama and the imported attractions at Ryōgoku.

Yoshitoyo's premature death in 1866 cut short what would surely have been a substantial Meiji-era career; his fellow Yoshi-pupils Yoshitora and Yoshifuji continued working into the 1880s and produced prints for the new Meiji Tokyo. As it is, Yoshitoyo's surviving œuvre is concentrated in the early 1860s and is closely tied to the documentary impulse of Yokohama-e and misemono-e in the immediate years before the Meiji Restoration. For students of late ukiyo-e, of the early modern Japanese encounter with the West, and of the Edo print market in its final years, Yoshitoyo is a small but significant figure whose prints are at once art, journalism, and historical record.