A similar feeling is so often repeated in Toyohiro's work that I venture to regard it as the keynote of his genius.
Toyohiro's landscapes are without notable beauty. He had a habit of cutting across the middle of his picture with wide streaks of white mist--an unpleasant device adopted to produce the effect of distance. He is, however, an historical link of great importance between his master, Toyoharu, and his pupil, Hiroshige, the greatest of all landscape painters. As a conduit of landscape painting at a time when the Ukioye School was little given to this as a separate study, Toyohiro's work in this field may well engage our attention; but one suspects that it is the fame of his great pupil's landscapes rather than the intrinsic merit of his own that has given his their prominence.
Toyohiro produced a few pillar-prints of birds which have great distinction; an almost classic feeling marks some of them.
Toyohiro's prints are not numerous; Toyokuni's outnumber his twenty to one. His pillar-prints are very rare; his triptychs are generally notable. It is necessary to add, however, that poor impressions of his work, printed in poor colours, are more common than any other kind.
FROM THE DEATH OF UTAMARO TO THE DEATH OF HIROSHIGE (1806-1858)
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.