Hishikawa Moronobu

Japanese painter and printmaker

• Born: 1618
• Birthplace: Hota, Japan
• Died: 1694
• Place of death: Edo (now Tokyo), Japan

The founder of the ukiyo-e school of printmaking, Hishikawa Moronobu was skilled in traditional Japanese painting styles. His basically monochrome prints, in the form of book illustrations, single sheets, and posters, served as the prototypes for the more colorful ukiyo-e prints developed by his successors a century later.

Early Life

Hishikawa Moronobu (hee-shee-kah-wah moh-roh-noh-boo) was born in the seaside town of Hota, in what is now Chiba Prefecture, east of Edo. His father, Kichizaemon, was a textile designer and brocade artisan who taught Moronobu skills he would later apply to woodcuts. After his father’s death in 1662, Moronobu left the local textile business and went to Edo to become an artist. He apparently spent some time studying the traditional painting techniques of the Kano school and occasionally produced scroll paintings and standing-screen paintings for wealthy Edo merchants.

Moronobu’s early years in Edo focused, however, on learning the art of producing woodcut illustrations with popular themes, first as illustrations for books, and then for picture albums (ehon), single prints (ichimai-e), and posters. The painter Iwasa Matabe, who died about a decade before Moronobu came to Edo, had painted pictures on popular themes commissioned by the shogun and other Edo notables. Iwasa is regarded by art historians as a forerunner of ukiyo-e because of his depiction of scenes from ordinary life, though both he and his audience were aristocratic. Iwasa’s work may have inspired early woodcut artists such as Kambun Kyōshi (Master of the Kambun Period), an otherwise nameless artist credited with producing fifty or more sets of book illustrations and several dozen early prints on popular themes.

Emulating these recent masters, Moronobu began producing prints focusing on Kabuki actors (yakusha-e), courtesans, and exceptionally beautiful Edo women (bijinga). Most of the people depicted were actual persons well known in Edo, and the prints served as a form of publicity. They were popular with fans, who might lack the opportunity to see these celebrities in person. Since these actors and courtesans lived in the artificial environment of the entertainment world, the prints came to be called ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world, because they depict an unstable, insecure, unanchored social order. Some of Moronobu’s entertainment prints were erotic or even pornographic, part of an ukiyo-e subgenre known by the euphemistic name shunga, or springtime pictures.

Life’s Work

Hishikawa Moronobu’s extant works are fairly sparse and are scattered in museums throughout the world, but his original output was very large. One of his famous ehon is Buke hyakunin isshu (1672; one hundred poems by one hundred samurai), a set of illustrations accompanying the poetry of noted samurai aristocrats. This picture album was designed to appeal to a merchant-class audience interested in martial arts figures. Moronobu also painted byōbu, paintings covering multiple panels or standing screens. His Ueno hanami zu oshiebari byōbu (c. 1688-1694; cherry-blossom viewing at Ueno), a six-panel set of folding screen paintings on silk using ink, color, and gold dust, is a panorama of parkland in Ueno, with character studies of people out to enjoy the scenery. Another screen shows scenes at an Edo Kabuki theater, the Nakamuraza, complete with a man at the entrance trying to attract customers and a view of a curtain call with the entire cast on stage.

Seventeenth century Japanese books and prints were generally produced from wooden block impressions. During the sixteenth century, woodblock printing was primarily used to produce copies of Buddhist scriptures and religious pictures, distributed by major Buddhist temples. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, however, illustrated books with secular themes began to appear in the Kyōto- Ōsaka area, as well as in Edo, after the latter city became the capital of the shogunate in the early seventeenth century.

While conventional illustrated books predominated in the Kyōto- Ōsaka area, a market developed in Edo for topical picture-books and for illustrations printed as separate sheets. By the mid-seventeenth century, there were a number of woodblock illustrators working for publishers in Edo. Moronobu is credited with having been the first such illustrator to persuade a publisher to print significant quantities of single-sheet illustrations without accompanying texts. These illustrations sold quite well, creating a public demand for more, and this early achievement by Moronobu is regarded as the origin of Japanese woodblock prints as a distinct artistic genre.

Moronobu’s hand-scrolls, long horizontal scrolls of sequential scenes designed for tabletop viewing, are also outstanding works of art. His Henge ga maki (fantastic transformation hand-scroll) is a curious combination of unwitting humans and menacing demons. His Shokunin zukushi emaki (craftspeople of various trades) is a pair of hand scrolls that show details of the work of various types of Edo artisans. This is a valuable source of information on the applied technology of the time and on modes of work and craftsmanship in late seventeenth century Edo. These scrolls include scenes from more than fifty different crafts and trades, including brush makers, street entertainers, swordsmiths, and sake brewers. In some cases, Moronobu’s hand-scroll pictures derived from prints, since he sometimes both printed related scenes as separate sheets and pasted them together onto hand-scrolls.

Among Moronobu’s woodblock prints are scenes from the Yoshiwara licensed quarters and the Edo Kabuki district, generally regarded as most typical of his work. These prints provide insights into the entertainment world of the time, which was frequented by merchants (chōnin) and samurai (bushi) alike. Since Moronobu’s pictures are believed to have been faithful to reality, it is possible to identify individual theaters or cabarets of the time. In addition, individual woodcuts that were originally designed as book illustrations have also survived, including Moronobu’s illustrated version of stories from the Ise monogatari (c. 980; Tales of Ise, 1968). Moronobu also sometimes portrayed religious themes, as in a surviving woodcut of the Buddhist sect founder Nichiren, praying for rain along with his followers.

While some artists may tend to underestimate their own importance, Moronobu seems not to have been one of them. He did not think of himself only as an ukiyo-e genre artist but referred to himself more broadly, as a Japanese artist (Nihon-e shi). Actually, the first recorded use of the term ukiyo-e appeared in a haiku poem in a collection published in 1681, when Moronobu was already more than sixty years old. Moronobu himself first used the term in writing in 1682, in the expression Yamato ukiyo-e (Japanese ukiyo-e), apparently emphasizing that this form was part of Japan’s national artistic heritage.

Moronobu’s final years extended into the first part of the Genroku Era (1688-1704), a time regarded by many Japanese historians as the high point of Tokugawa art, theater, and literature. Although he was already seventy when the Genroku Era began, Moronobu is ranked by historians as one of the greatest artists of this era, along with the screen painter Ogata Kōrin and Kōrin’s younger brother, the great potter and ceramic artist Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743).

Significance

While most people today think of Japanese prints as being outstanding in their gradations and juxtapositions of vivid colors, woodcut technology in Moronobu’s time was capable of producing little more than black-on-white, monochrome depictions. Since Moronobu was an accomplished traditional painter as well, he was able to paint over the main figures and details in color after the fact, transforming individual monochrome prints into color paintings. As a result, people today often do not realize that the pioneering Moronobu never made actual color prints.

After Moronobu’s time, some prints came to be made using just a few colors, but it was not until the time of Suzuki Harunobi (1725-1770), more than half a century later, that it became technically possible to produce multicolor prints, known as nishiki-e (brocade prints), that were as striking in their use of color as the brocades that Moronobu had begun his career designing and creating, when he had first started out back in Hota.

Moronobu’s own greatest contribution to the development of ukiyo-e art is thought to be his unique creation of a series of inventive subgenres, depicting various aspects of daily life and nightlife in Edo. The manner of depiction originated by Moronobu came to be first accepted, and then expected, by the general public. By the time Suzuki Harunobi began his creative career, he was able to focus his attention on technical improvements in the production values of ukiyo-e prints, since Moronobu had already explored and developed most of the artistic themes used in them during the Edo Period.

Bibliography

Clark, Timothy. The Dawn of the Floating World, 1650-1765: Early Ukiyo-e Treasures from the Museum of Fine Arts. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2001. A detailed catalog and analysis of a collection shown at the Boston Museum of Arts and then at the London Royal Academy.

Fahr-Becker, Gabriele. Japanese Prints. London: Taschen, 2002. An illustrated history of the development of Edo prints.

Gentles, Margaret. Masters of the Japanese Print: Moronobu to Utamaro. New York: Arno Press, 1976. An illustrated and annotated catalog of prints, beginning with the work of Hishikawa Moronobu.

Gerhart, Karen M. The Eyes of Power: Art and Early Tokugawa Authority. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Focuses on art patronage by the Tokugawa shogunate in the seventeenth century.

Guth, Christine. Art of Edo Japan: The Artist and the City, 1615-1868. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1996. An illustrated general history of art in the Tokugawa shogunal city of Edo.

Kobayashi, Tadashi. Ukiyo-e: An Introduction to Japanese Woodblock Prints. New York: Kodansha International, 1997. A concise guide to woodblock prints by a Japanese prints expert.