From the Death of Utamaro to the Death of Hiroshige (1806-1858)

When Utamaro died, in 1806, the great days of the figure-print were ended. There were to be no more Harunobus or Kiyonagas or Sharakus—only a horde of little men whose work retained few traces of the earlier greatness. And our serious interest in the art as a whole must end here. Were it not for the superb renaissance of landscape which this period includes, side by side with the decay of figure-designing, it would be my choice to mark this date as the end of our history.

The causes of the degradation of prints in this period appear to have been of several natures. For one, the accidents that regulate the birth of geniuses operated unkindly, and few artists of first-rate talent came to take the places of the dead masters. Further, the colour-print had gone somewhat out of fashion among its original public, and the people who now bought were chiefly of a lower and more ignorant class than the purchasers of Kiyonaga's day. To the less exacting but eager demands of this class the publishers catered with coarser designs, cruder colours, and more careless printing. Now, in literal truth, the print-designer was the artisan; and amid the vast flood of commonplace productions of the time it is difficult to search out those few works that have a claim to beauty.

It is probable that a general loss in refinement of taste marked the epoch and was reflected in the prints. The uncouth flaring designs of the textiles, the gross overladen coiffures, the excess of decoration that lay like a blight over all the instruments of life at this time, naturally had their influence upon the standards of the artist.

Furthermore, the movement toward realism here reached its climax. Dominated by Hokusai's earlier work, the artists abandoned the old traditional devotion to stylistic restraint and went madly in chase of a distorted kind of literal truth that had no relation to beauty. Men who were too impotent to create visions nobly and too dull to observe reality keenly attempted to conceal their double weakness by a double evasion—spoiling what claim their work had to idealistic imagination by touches of crude realism, and ruining it as realism by the most grotesque aberrations of fancy. In the sphere of erotic prints this was characteristically and repellently manifest. Certain examples of this type, produced in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, surpass in grossness even the most studied of European specimens. In landscape alone has the period something of the highest charm to offer us.

The School of Toyokuni.

As we have seen, Toyokuni's career ended anything but brilliantly. Unfortunately his numerous followers appear to have been influenced more by his final work than by the production of his better days. I do not regard it as profitable to wade, as some writers have done, through this wearying period of degenerate production and tabulate every fact obtainable about every insignificant artist with the same care that one would bestow upon Kiyonaga. I shall therefore be content to note down only the most salient features of this epoch of disintegration.

Following Toyokuni, at least four men used the name made famous by him. The first of these, Toyokuni II, was that same Toyokuni Gosotei of whom we shall treat under the heading of Landscape. His use of the name Toyokuni appears to have been between the years 1825 and 1835.

Toyokuni III was better known as Kunisada I; for though he was born in 1786 and lived until 1865, he did not adopt the name of Toyokuni until about 1844. He added to our confusion by the fact that he signed himself "Toyokuni" or "Toyokuni II," never recognizing the claims of the real Toyokuni II to the name. Most frequently Kunisada's Toyokuni signature is enclosed in a long red cartouch, a device never used by Toyokuni I. This very undistinguished artist was one of the most prolific producers of the school. All that meaningless complexity of design, coarseness of colour, and carelessness of printing which we associate with the final ruin of the art of colour-prints finds full expression in him. Every tourist returning from Japan brings back dozens of crudely coloured prints by him or by the members of his school, under the misapprehension that these are the famous and valuable Japanese prints of which he has vaguely heard. The only figure work of Kunisada's that I am able to recall with any pleasure is his really notable Memorial Portrait of Hiroshige, a dignified and impressive print. The few landscapes he produced are of much greater beauty than his figures, and one is inclined to wish that he had done more in this field and less in the other.

Toyokuni IV was also known as Kunisada II and as Kunimasa II. Born 1833, he died 1880. His prints, largely executed in cheap analine colours, set one's teeth on edge with some of the most shrieking discords that I have ever encountered. There exists an unfortunate collector who proudly brought back from Japan one hundred and nineteen triptychs by this artist.

Toyokuni V was also called Kunisada III and Kunimasa III. His work was worthless.

Kunimasa I (1772-1810) was an exceedingly able pupil of Toyokuni, who was influenced by Sharaku. Some of his work is very fine; he stands out as one of the few notable designers of this group.

Kuninaga, who died in 1804, was a rare pupil of Toyokuni. His work is pleasant, though it has no great distinction; but it is far more attractive than the work of most of these men, for the reason that he had the good luck to die before the period of general disintegration began. The Spaulding Collection contains a fine diptych by him, in black and several shades of yellow, in the early style of Toyokuni.

Kunimitsu was also an early pupil of Toyokuni. His work is agreeable but not notable.

From the vast number of minor followers of the Toyokuni tradition, I select the following as the most common: Kuniyasu I, Kuniyasu II, Toyokiyo, Toyohiro II, Kunifusa, Kunihiro, Kunitane, Kunikatsu, Kunihisa, Kunitera, Kuniteru, Kunikane I, Kunikane II, Kunitaka, Kunimune, Kunihiko, Kunitoki, Kuniyuki, Kunitsuma, Kunikiyo, Kunihana, Kunitohisa, Kunimichi I, Kunimichi II, Kuniao I, Kuniao II, Kunitora, Kunitaki, Kunitsugi I, Kunitsugi II, Kunitada, Kuninobu II, Kuniaki, Kiyokuni, Kunimaru I, Kunimaru II, Kunichika, Chikashige, Yoshitaki, Yoshitsuru, Yoshiume, Yoshitsuna, Yoshisato, Yoshifuji, Yoshikage, Yoshikuni, Yoshichika, Yoshikazu, Yoshiharu, Shunbeni, Yoshitomi, Yoshifusa, Sugakudo, Sencho, Tominobu.

Chikamaro is said to be identical with Kiosai, whose work sometimes resembles Hokusai's. Born in 1831, he died very late in the century. He was a vigorous designer—perhaps the best of all the later men. His crow pictures are famous.

Kikugawa Yeizan, a prolific and undistinguished designer of the first quarter of the century, was a late rival and imitator of Utamaro. He eventually sank even to imitating Kunisada. The flowing draperies of some of his prints of women are at first sight attractive to eyes not accustomed to the finest works in this field; but the complete banality of Yeizan's powers becomes manifest on more prolonged acquaintance, and any trace of charm disappears.

Followers of the Torii School.

Here may be mentioned those artists in whom the once-great Torii School came to its inglorious end.

Kiyomine, the fifth head of the school, sometimes signed himself Kiyomitsu; his work is easily distinguishable from that of the first Kiyomitsu. He studied under Kiyonaga, and later adopted a style somewhat like that of Toyokuni. His work is graceful, but not distinguished. Prints by him are rather rare. He died in 1868.

Kiyofusa, who died as late as 1892, was the sixth Torii. He also called himself Kiyomitsu III and Kiyosada II. Other late members of this school were: Kiyomoto II, Kiyoyasu, Kiyotada II, Kiyotada III, Kiyosada I.

The Osaka School.

In the first half of the nineteenth century there grew into importance in the city of Osaka a group of designers who constituted an exception to the statement made earlier in this book—that the art of colour-printing was exclusively a Yedo art. Hokusai is known to have visited Osaka in 1818; and possibly it was his influence that encouraged the movement. At any rate, a large number of the Osaka group were pupils of Hokusai or followers of his manner.

The school thus entered into real activity at a date when the art was far gone in its decline; and its designs produced no arresting effect. Most of the work of these men is crude. Yet when we look at the products of the second quarter of the century in Yedo, we may very possibly feel that the Osaka output was at least no worse. It included chiefly theatrical portraits, all done with a peculiar hardness of line and cold brilliance of colour, and printed as a rule very skilfully. These by no means approach the works of Shunsho, Shunyei, and Sharaku, after which they were obviously patterned, nor even the works of Toyokuni; but the hard treatment so characteristic of them gives a certain dignity of effect which Kunisada's flowing and formless earthquakes of draperies generally lack.

The school does not call for elaborate treatment; the following men may be mentioned as among the best known: Hokushu, Hasegawa Sadanobu, Sadakage, Kagetoshi, Sadafusa, Sadatora, Sadamasa, Sadamasu, Sadahiro, Sadayoshi, Ashikuni, Ashiyuki, Hirosada, Shunshi, Horai Shunsho II, Hokumio, Hanzan, Yoshiiku, and Ranko. Others will be mentioned later as pupils of Hokusai or as landscape-painters.

The Renaissance of Landscape.

Like a beautiful island in the midst of a sea of wrecks, the landscape prints of the first half of the nineteenth century stand apart from the general debasement of print-designing. The great days of the figure-print were over; but now, into an art filled with the second-rate followers of Utamaro and Toyokuni, came the fresh and brilliant landscape genius of Hokusai and Hiroshige. Their work did not share in the general decline; it must be regarded as a new shoot sent up by the roots of a tree whose main trunk had already fallen into irreparable decay.

Landscape-prints were not a new thing; Utamaro and Toyohiro had already produced fine work of this nature, and interesting examples are to be found as we look backward through the work of Toyoharu, Shigemasa, Kiyonobu, and Masanobu—back, in fact, almost to the beginning of the art. But these earlier landscapes were, upon the whole, of subordinate importance; beside the figure-prints of the earlier masters, they seem crude and rudimentary. Previous to Hokusai and Hiroshige, they were chiefly of topographical, not of Æsthetic, intention and interest. In the nineteenth century their importance became paramount.

"Japanese colour-prints devoted to landscape," writes Mr. Strange, "form a class apart in the art of the world. There is nothing else like them; neither in the highly idealistic and often lovely abstractions of the aristocratic painters of Japan, nor in the more imitative and, it must be said, more meaningless transcripts from nature, of European artists. The colour-print, as executed by the best men of the Japanese popular school, occupies an intermediate place; perhaps thus furnishing a reason why we Westerners so easily appreciate it. Its imagery and sentiment are elementary in the eyes of the native critics of Japanese high art. Its attempts at realism are in his eyes mere evidence of vulgarity. On the other hand these very qualities endear it to us. We can understand the first, without the long training in symbolism which is the essential of refinement to an educated man of the extreme East. And the other characteristic forms, in our eyes, a leading recommendation. In short, the landscapes of artists such as Hiroshige approach more nearly to our own standards, and are thus more easily acceptable to us than anything else in the pictorial arts of China and Japan; while they have all the fascination of a strange technique, a bold and undaunted convention, and a superb excellence of composition not too remote in principle from our own."

Hokusai.

Until rather recently Hokusai was, for European spectators, as isolated and commanding a figure in the domain of Japanese art as Fuji is in the Japanese landscape. He was regarded as the one culminating and all-inclusive genius among Japanese painters and print-designers. At precisely the same time, he was esteemed by Japanese connoisseurs to be a prolific but vulgar artisan, whose mere craftsman-dexterity could not compensate for his lack of lofty feeling and poetic vision.

It is not necessary to quarrel with either of these views. Almost every student of Hokusai passes through three stages. At first, he is overwhelmed by Hokusai's technical skill and imaginative brilliance, and regards him as unrivalled. Deeper experience brings him the conviction that much of this magical dexterity is somewhat in the nature of a juggler's antics in a vaudeville, and that his first burst of enthusiasm was not wholly warranted. Then, finally, he comes to perceive that there are qualities in Hokusai's work which, in spite of so much that is vulgar, justly entitle this artist to his high fame.

One classes Hokusai as a landscape-artist; yet his work was by no means confined to landscape. He pictured, as M. ThÉodore Duret wrote, "everything to be seen by the eye or invented by the brain of a Japanese." His "Mangwa," that vast twelve-volume collection of drawings, includes sketches of a whole world of varied scenes and objects and people. The bulk of his production was colossal—dozens of designs a day throughout most of his eighty-nine years!

His figures are drawn with a swift and sure realism that is generally tinged with humour and often with vulgarity. His vigorous power of observing and recording faces and attitudes is almost unparalleled. Fantasy, whimsical conceits, irony, grotesqueness animate them; always they have superabundant life. The play of his brush is miraculous.

His landscapes are his greatest works. In the best of these he shakes off his trifling mood, and, as in Plate 51, creates designs whose stark brilliance and originality of composition is unsurpassed. And at least once, in the noblest of his prints—the rare and monumental series of "The Imagery of the Poets"—he achieves a high seriousness that will always be impressive.

Hokusai was born in 1760, the son of a mirror-maker. He lived to the age of eighty-nine years—a long life, crowded with privation that wins our sympathy, and with incessant devotion to his art. When in his seventies, he said: "Ever since the age of six years I have felt the impulse to draw the forms of objects. Up to the age of fifty years I made a great number of drawings; but I am dissatisfied with everything that I created prior to my seventieth year. At the age of seventy-three I, for the first time, began to grasp the true forms and nature of birds, fishes, and plants. It follows that at the age of eighty I shall have made still greater progress; at ninety I shall be able to create all objects; at a hundred I shall certainly have attained to still higher, unimaginable power; and when I finally reach my one hundred and tenth year, every line, every dot will live with an intense life. I invite those who are going to live as long as I to convince themselves whether I shall keep my word. Written at the age of seventy-five years by me, formerly Hokusai, now called the Old Man Mad with Painting." His dying words were: "If the gods had given me only ten years more—only five years more—I could have become a really great painter!"

Hokusai's education began as an apprentice to a wood-engraver, a valuable experience for his later career. At the age of eighteen he entered the studio of Shunsho and adopted the name of Shunro. Under this name he produced actors in the orthodox Shunsho manner and melodramatic illustrations for the popular romances of the day. About 1786 a quarrel with Shunsho, due to the pupil's insubordination, led to Hokusai's expulsion, and he thereupon launched out for himself, to begin his long life of poverty and madly enthusiastic labour.

His work may be divided roughly into three periods. In the first he followed the traditions of Shunsho, Shunyei, Utamaro, and others of his contemporaries, with great skill but no special originality. His countless book-illustrations of this time were all conceived with lively fancy and vigour; but perhaps the finest works of this, his conventional period, are the very wide prints and surimono in which, against a delicately suggested landscape, move extraordinarily graceful women's figures not unlike those of Utamaro. Already he was a master of drawing; but he kept incessantly at his studies under many teachers, learning, among other things, European perspective from Shiba Kokan. His work was done in this and the following periods under a dozen different names, of which Sori, Kako, Shunro, and Taito are the most important.

In 1812 began his second or realistic period, with the publication of the first book of his fifteen-volume series of drawings, the "Mangwa." In this epoch he turned from the styles of his predecessors and launched into a hitherto unknown journalistic realism. With a lively sense of the comic and the burlesque, and an insatiable interest in the homeliest details of life, he threw overboard all formal stylistic quality and set sail on a riotous voyage of naturalistic discovery.

The "Mangwa," which may serve as a type of his whole production in this realistic period, is praised sometimes as his greatest work. In it we shall find not only his most striking tours-de-force as a draughtsman but also the key to his weakness. All existence thrilled him as it did Walt Whitman; and each object on which he turned his eyes stirred him with the desire to record it in his pages. Day after day he worked like a madman, throwing off his sketches of man, beast, and phantom, of rock, river, and sea, in endless profusion and with inexhaustible ingenuity. And though we grant our admiration to the enthusiasm, sharp vision, and clever draughtsmanship of these sheets, we may still find in this undiscriminating passion a quality incompatible with the highest reaches of artistic greatness. There is something vulgar, childish, under-developed in the mental attitude revealed; it seems a coarse greed for all experience, unlighted by the power to judge and reject, or by any consciousness of the ranks and hierarchies of beauty. It is a vast and dull enthusiasm; a celebration of the victory of the will to live over the will to perfect; a triumph of meaningless sensation over the just judgments of the discriminating mind. All shapes seem equally interesting and beautiful to it—all smells equally sweet. As Pater writes of Balzac—a man who was in many ways not unlike Hokusai—this artist "had an excess of curiosity—curiosity not duly tempered with the desire of beauty."

I can never look through the "Mangwa" without a sense of distressing chaos and a longing for the purer beauties which more finely organized artists have evoked from the heterogeneous welter of the seen world. But just this welter is at this time Hokusai's theme. "A debauch of sketches," Fenollosa calls it. In this work Hokusai stands beside Harunobu exactly as Whitman stands beside Keats—a more interesting mind but a far less perfect artist.

"Hokusai is incomparable," writes the commentator who furnished the introduction to one of his books. "While all his predecessors were more or less slaves to classical tradition and inherited rules, he alone emancipated his brush from all such fetters, and drew according to the dictates of his heart." True: and this was his curse. No man has ever lived with heart profound and subtle enough for such emancipation. Nor have the supreme artists ever attempted it. In Hokusai's case this upstart-abandoning of all tradition was an error from which he was able later to retrieve himself; but so great was the impression produced by his vulgarities on the mob that even to this day popular Japanese art has remained under the cloud of it.

Hokusai himself did recover. In his third period, the stylistic one, the greatness that was in him transcended his petty interest in the trivial idiosyncrasies of seen things, and he created those visions which constitute his lasting glory. Between 1823 and 1830 he issued those series, "The Thirty-six Views of Fuji," "The Bridges," "The Waterfalls," "The Loocho Islands," and "The Imagery of the Poets," in which we hail him as master. No longer the dupe of realism, he brings us his dreams.

"The Thirty-six Views of Fuji" stands as one of his two greatest works. Here, in the forty-six plates that constitute the main series and the supplement, the same motive is treated recurrently, but with infinite variety. He depicts Fuji, the sacred mountain, in storm and calm, in mist and sunlight—sometimes dominating the colossally empty frame of the design, sometimes receding to a mere speck in the distance; and around the noble peak beat the waves of the sea and the foam of the clouds and the restless stream of human life, in a great epic of infinite diversity and profound unity.

In this series his trivial realism is forgotten, or employed only in just subordination. Throwing aside his earlier vulgar absorption in the minutiÆ of existence, he concentrated his vision on one conception, one chosen impression, so sharply and personally seen that he evoked a new style in landscape. Much it borrowed from tradition; but the flavour was Hokusai's. These designs are, primarily, magnificent studies in linear composition. The great sweep of Fuji's slope is related to the rhythm of every other line in the picture. And the line-dominance is preserved by the use of the simplest and most original of colour-schemes—green, blue, and brown—broadly laid on in large masses. A highly decorative quality and great boldness are the result.

The justly famous "Wave" belongs to this series. Here for the first time in our survey of the prints do we find elemental fury depicted with grandiose eloquence. In the majestic composition of the "Great Tree" (Plate 50) the calm sublimity of nature and the infinitely minute, vermin-like aspect of man is superbly expressed. In the "Tama River" (Plate 49) Hokusai gives us a sweep of wave and shore, mist and mountain, that his great predecessors, the landscape-painters of Sung days in China, might have envied. In all these prints he relates man and nature to each other with a vividness and dramatic power foreign to his great rival Hiroshige.

The world which Hokusai pictures in this series is not the real world, but Hokusai's highly personal translation of it into terms of superb imagination. A thousand memory-stored impressions combine to make the sharp composite of each design; and it is to use the term in its technical Platonic sense, the Idea of the scene that he flashes before us. Herein lies the abnormal vitality that emanates from these pictures. "We feel," says Mr. Binyon, "that the world holds more wonders than we dreamed of, sources of power and exhilaration which Hokusai has revealed, and which we may go and discover for ourselves."

Hokusai's other great work was a series of ten upright prints of very large size, "The Imagery of the Poets." It returns in feeling, though not in technique, to the style of the classic masters; and remains, because of its high seriousness of mood and its sweeping magnificence of composition, at the very top of all Hokusai's work. Of all his thousands of designs, the one that is supreme is probably the print of this set which depicts the famous Chinese poet Li Peh beside the chasm and cascade of Luh.

Even his latest years were crowded with continued efforts. In 1849, at the age of eighty-nine years, he died.

Fine and well-preserved Hokusai prints are not common. His "Poets" and really brilliant impressions of his "Thirty-six Fuji" are very rare, particularly the former. Poor impressions of the latter are numerous. Practically all of Hokusai's most famous prints have been reproduced, and the collector must be on his guard against these worthless sheets. One of the best-known judges in Europe was recently deceived by a fraudulent set of the "Poets." Hokusai's fine bird-and-flower designs and his large early surimono are rare; as also are good copies of his famous books, the "Mangwa" and the "One Hundred Views of Fuji." Numerous late blurred impressions of these are extant, and should be avoided. His other books are not uncommon.

Pupils and Followers of Hokusai.

Hokusai had many pupils; no one of them equalled the landscape work of the master, though several of them produced designs of great interest. As a body they were distinguished for their matchless work in the field of surimono.

The surimono was a type of print not sold in the market; it was made upon special order of private individuals for use as a festival-greeting, an invitation, a congratulatory memorial, or an announcement. Its size was generally small, about five or six inches square; printed on very soft thick paper, it displayed the utmost complexity of the technique of colour-printing. The number of blocks was lavishly multiplied; the most subtle gradations of colour were contrived; and the effect was heightened by every variety of gauffrage, gold, silver, and bronze powders, and mother-of-pearl dust. Yet in spite of all this effort, the surimono is, in the opinion of many collectors, not as a rule very important as a work of art. In the ordinary surimono the medium employed has outstripped the motive expressed, and what should have been the means has become the sole end. Nevertheless they are unrivalled as specimens of workmanship and printing, and the best of them are highly treasured. Some of Hokusai's pupils excelled their master in this form.

Gakutei, who also signed himself Gogaku, produced perhaps the finest surimono of any that we know. His work in this field was voluminous and distinguished. He also issued a few exceedingly decorative landscapes.

Hokkei stands beside Gakutei as a brilliant producer of surimono, closely in the manner of Hokusai. Some of his landscapes, printed in blue and green, have a curious charm and individuality.

Hokuju produced landscapes in a strange semi-European style, with angular mountains and unusual cloud effects.

Yanagawa Shigenobu, the son-in-law of Hokusai, copied his master closely; some of his work has great charm. According to some authorities he is the same person to whom Hokusai gave his discarded name, Katsushika Taito. Certain prints signed Taito are still somewhat in doubt, notably the well-known leaping fish and the moon-and-bridge scene, both from the "Harimaze Han"; Mr. Happer has brought forward evidence that these are by Taito, but many authorities still hold to the idea that they are the work of Hokusai under his early name. Among the numberless Hokusai pupils may be named: Hokuba, Hokuga, Niho, Shigeyama, Gokei, Shinsai, Isai, Hokuun, Hokuyei, Hokutei, Hokutai, Hokusui, Taigaku, Renshi, Juzan, Yasumichi, Bokusen, Keiju, Ryusai, Gangakusai, Keiri, Hokuyo.

Hiroshige.

Hiroshige takes rank by unanimous consent as the foremost landscape artist produced by the Ukioye School. His prints, known to every one, have been more greatly admired in Western lands than the prints of any other artist except Hokusai. Hokusai's main concern was with the fundamental architecture of landscape; he outlined the structure of mountains, rocks, rivers, waves, and bridges with a hard and brilliant sharpness; but Hiroshige, less rigid in his treatment, seems chiefly intent upon the more delicate and transitory appearances of cloud and mist, rain and snow, sunrise and dusk, that give to a landscape at each moment so much of its specific character. These atmospheric effects of his are justly famous. Few landscape painters of any race have succeeded in rendering so finely the mood of a scene. No one can be insensible to the delicate peace and sweetness of a twilight like that of Plate 52, or the vigorous life of wide sea spaces in Plate 53, or the heavy hush of nightfall over the snow-covered village of Plate 54. Even more impressive are the luminous and solemn dusk on the Sumida River (Plate 55) and the mystery of the print called "The Bow-Moon" which appears as the frontispiece.

The Bow-Moon.

Hiroshige's great strength lay in his genius for strikingly effective composition, and in the skill with which he adapted his designs to the limitations of the colour-print technique. He reduced the pictured scene to a few simple elements of a highly decorative character, and managed to make them so symbolic and suggestive that we do not miss the multitude of details which he purposely omits. A strongly dominant unity of impression is the result. His finest designs convey a sense of personal feeling that even the Barbizon artists at their best do not surpass. With the limited resources of the wood block, he achieved subtle renderings of distance, aerial perspective, atmosphere, and light; and the poetic quality of his designs has endeared him to generations of print-lovers in a way more personal than is the case with any other artist. His work will stand beside the "Liber Studiorum" of Turner; it remains perhaps the most complete and magnificent landscape record that any land has ever had.

One curious characteristic of these prints at once strikes the Western eye—the use of a band of dark colour along the top of the picture, which is shaded gradually down into the clear white of the lower sky. This convention serves several purposes. It provides a mass to balance the colour at the bottom of the design, bringing the whole sheet into the picture and not leaving the upper portion as a mere margin above the landscape proper. It also creates depth and atmosphere, setting the brightest part of the design, the middle, back into the frame created by the upper and lower masses. And finally, it renders with peculiar accuracy the effect of gradual vanishing which we actually experience as we look at a landscape: in our visual field, the sky does not end in a sharp line, but blurs and darkens at the upper edge of the space that our eyes survey.

Hiroshige's bird and flower designs are works of extraordinary freshness and loveliness; a unique and idyllic charm emanates from them, and as compositions they take high rank (Plate 56).

Hiroshige was born in 1796, just as the great period of figure-designing was drawing to its close. As a youth he attempted to gain entrance to the studio of Toyokuni; but the fortunate fact that there was no room for him forced him to enter the studio of the less popular but more subtly gifted Toyohiro. Here he studied landscape, a branch in which he was destined far to outstrip his master. That delicate genius which was Toyohiro's cannot but have produced its effect upon the pupil; and it pleases one to fancy that it is some echo of Toyohiro's inarticulate refinement of feeling that gains at last full expression in some of Hiroshige's most beautiful landscapes.

In 1828 Toyohiro died; and Hiroshige became independent. His earliest works probably antedate this time a little; they consist of a few figures of women and actors, and two very fine horizontal landscape series. These were the "Toto Meisho," or earliest series of Yedo views, distinguished by curious long red clouds in each plate; and the "Honcho Meisho," a group of views of the main island of Japan. Particularly the first of these sets contains work of great beauty.

Shortly after 1830 Hiroshige found occasion to travel from Yedo, the northern capital, to Kyoto, the southern capital, along the great post-road which he has immortalized—the Tokaido. There resulted his series of horizontal plates, "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido," completed about 1834. This remains his best-known and unsurpassed work. Plate 53 is from this series. Each picture records with unfailing vividness and originality some famous scene along the crowded national highway. For reasons unknown to us, Hiroshige prepared new designs for some of the plates after the original publication of the series; and these variation-plates are of great interest to collectors.

Of the many series that followed, only the most important can be named here. All are of horizontal shape unless otherwise designated.

Naniwa Meisho, ten views of Osaka—chiefly crowded wharf and market scenes.

Kyoto Meisho, ten views of Kyoto; a varied and delightful series containing many fine prints.

Plate 54.