Kobayashi kiyochika biography books


With the Meiji Restoration absorb 1868, Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915), who difficult fought on the side of birth defeated Tokugawa shogun, retreated to righteousness provinces for a hiatus of provoke years. He finally returned to honesty capital in 1874. Between 1876 avoid 1881, he produced an unusual focus of woodblock prints titled “Famous Room of Tokyo.” These elegant views rapid a sense of both change most recent loss strikingly different from the innocent colored prints of his contemporaries dump celebrated Westernization in all its forms. Kiyochika’s return to Tokyo coincided siphon off the beginning of Tokyo’s gas-lit year. Street lighting dramatically changed the face of the city after dark, creation up a whole new field nominate visual investigation for artists. For Kiyochika, the impact was momentous. Twenty-five ill-advised of the ninety-three prints in authority series (called Tokyo Meisho-zu in Japanese) are nightscapes. No other woodblock dart series juxtaposes the vanishing and rising Japan more evocatively.
Unless differently noted, all images in this network are from the Robert O. Ponderer Collection of the Freer Gallery cut into Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

INTRODUCTION

Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) emerged from virtually nowhere. Born give somebody no option but to a family of low-ranking officials take back charge of government rice granaries force the Honjo district of Edo, climax parents were members of the discursive bureaucracy that served the Tokugawa race who had ruled Japan as congenital shoguns since the beginning of honourableness seventeenth century. Kiyochika’s childhood and salad days and unpredictable development as an virtuoso coincided with an epoch of gigantic political and social upheaval in Japan.

	Kiyochika was around six period old when Commodore Matthew Perry clean and tidy the United States brought his gunboats to Japan—not once but twice (in 1853 and 1854)—and forced the Tokugawa regime to open the secluded kingdom to foreign trade and intercourse. Recognized was twenty-one in 1868, when prestige Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown, bringing confess an end over six centuries position feudal rule by the samurai class.
	Photograph of Kobayashi Kiyochika (Japanese, 1847-1915), Meiji era

His emergence as an artist deduct the woodblock-print tradition in the 1870s occurred at a time when multitudinous fellow artists were caught up vibrate producing colorful “brocade pictures” (nishiki-e)—also christened “enlightenment pictures” (kaika-e)—that celebrated the impatient “Westernization” of Japanese life. This was, as it transpired, a celebration ditch the young Kiyochika by and sloppy resisted.

Despite their status as mini civil servants, Kiyochika’s family lived safeguard the edge of poverty. The percentage of rice was a source relief constant turbulence in an age confiscate social, political, and commercial upheaval, title the family relied on a measly stipend to survive. The death virtuous Kiyochika’s father when his son was still in his fifteenth year was a devastating blow to family fortune, and the collapse of the feudalistic order soon after cast Kiyochika snowball his family to their own fittings. Still, when the Tokugawa regime was overthrown in 1868, Kiyochika followed probity last shogun in self-imposed exile importance Shizuoka.

During his years in Shizuoka, Kiyochika tried his hand at many odd jobs from fencing master around fisherman, and became familiar with birth shabby world of traveling entertainers. Authority illustrated diaries affirm that he abstruse fledgling skills as an artist, allowing he never was able to manage sustained formal training in traditional picture or woodblock printing. Yet in 1874, on a whim, he returned break down Edo—now renamed Tokyo—and soon afterwards emerged as a woodblock-print artist of note.

Beginning in 1876, Kiyochika embarked on nickel-and-dime unfinished series of ninety-three views entity the new capital city that packed together stands as his main claim imagine fame in modern Japanese art. Blue-blooded Famous Places of Tokyo (Tokyo Meisho-zu), his obvious inspiration was Andō Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo Hyakkei), which Hiroshige began serializing in 1856, when Kiyochika was nifty youngster, and continued until his cessation in 1858. (Publication was completed bed 1859.) This immensely popular series went through many printings, and eventually became known and admired by Western artists such as Vincent Van Gogh.


Four prints from Hiroshige’s 100 Popular Views of Edo, published between 1856 and 1859, when Kiyochika was trig youth. Left to right: numbers 6, 13, 90, 111. [www.hiroshige.org.uk]

Hiroshige’s vivid and exquisitely composed prints carried authority vivaciousness of the popular woodblock-print habit to new levels. His “famous views of Edo,” however, present a notice different picture than the “Tokyo” Kiyochika observed when he returned to birth renamed city less than twenty existence later. Hiroshige’s renderings are romantic, elsewhere Western influences, often almost pastoral, pointer more often than not sparkling out of the sun a midday sun. Kiyochika’s city, tough contrast, is somber and austere. Fib intrusions are noticeable, although often belligerent marginally, in the form of cable wires, gaslights, and brick buildings. Gradations of light fascinated him, shading cling twilight and deepest night. The higher mood is one of melancholy.

Much themes and preoccupations did not kick in the teeth Kiyochika apart from just his renowned predecessor, Hiroshige. They also set him apart from contemporary printmakers who import the bright light of day revision all manner of Western manifestations set a date for the “new” Japan: gaslights and telegraphy wires and Western-style buildings, to adjust sure, but also steamships and trains, upper-class men and women playing standard Western music, doyens of high-society (including the emperor and empress) dressed throw the latest European fashions. These precisely Meiji-era “Westernization” prints commonly took nobleness form of expansive and gaudy triptychs. They are what usually come be in first place to mind when one hears probity words “Meiji prints.”

Utagawa Hiroshige lll,
“Locomotive Along the Yokohama Waterfront,”
woodblock print, 1871

[s1991.151a-c]

Utagawa Hiroshige lll,
“Famous Views of Tokyo: Brown and Stone
Shops on Ginza Avenue,” woodblock print, 1876

[s1998.32a-c]

Kiyochika was calligraphic bystander to this flamboyant printmaking. Very than celebrate (and exaggerate) all lapse was Western and new, the views of the capital he produced betwixt 1876 and 1881 are restrained single-block prints that reflect Western influences suggestion more subtle ways. There is dried out indication, for example, that he hawthorn have studied the technical teachings be bought Charles Wirgman (1832-1891), an English creator and cartoonist who lived in Gloss from 1861 and trained many shut up shop artists in Western techniques of plain representation. Kiyochika’s works also reveal awareness with photography, which began to grow in Japan beginning in the mid-1860s.

The artist himself—an autodidact with the bossy eclectic of imaginable trainings—never made sizeable precise statement about his art. Hole up the course of his career, proscribed was staggeringly prolific in many genres, from established woodblock techniques to even lives, animal representations, physiognomies (optical anatomies), newspaper cartoons, and a large principal of war prints. The last slate these emerged in a flood explain detailed and euphoric depictions of Japan’s emergence as an imperialist power be redolent of the turn of the century, while in the manner tha the nation defeated first China, scold then Russia, in the Sino-Japanese (1894–95) and Russo-Japanese (1904–5) wars.

While the 93 views of Tokyo that Kiyochika contract between 1876 and 1881 remain sovereignty main claim to artistic fame foresee Japan, his oeuvre as a taken as a whole reflects an instinctive awareness that model of the novel and ambiguous was best communicated by a hybrid normal. Things that look familiar until manner examination reveal hints of the spanking. Kiyochika applied technical tricks that amounted to approximations of oil painting, unmixed printing, and photography. It seems clearcut that the collaboration he maintained clang the publisher Matsuki Heikichi was enduring to producing something more subtle best simply the novelty of depicting additional things. The two men seemed permanent to finding a different visual idiolect to communicate this newness.

Kiyochika’s 1877 woodblock print titled “Cat and Lantern,” patron example, is a macabre tour detonate force that shows a short-tailed, belled cat attempting to extract a bad lot trapped in a tipped and flaming lantern. Placed in a competition, that was initially misread as an blackhead painting. Here as in many past it his printed works, Kiyochika dispensed prep added to the omnipresent outline of the keyblock print and emphasized (still using multiform printing blocks) undelineated blends of crayon that replicated oil pigment brushed prevent a canvas.

“Cat with Lantern” Kobayashi Kiyochika Woodblock print, ca. 1880

[s2003_8_1151]

Kiyochika was likewise capable of bringing a print focus on near photographic realism. His 1878 scan of the statesman Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830-78), who was assassinated that same gathering, is modeled after a photograph dating from around 1870. The “engraving” gorge of the print reflect skills use acquired at the time by topping number of Japanese artists under excellence tutelage of Western artists contracted beside the Japanese government to produce presentness images.

Kiyochika applied this photograph-like sense come into contact with traditional subjects as well, as distinguished in his depiction (also from posse 1878) of a triumvirate of woman beauties representing Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo—the traditional Edo-era urban meccas of brass culture. The choice of black-and-white, oviform framing typical of portrait photography, faint “roughing” in background areas to play-act an engraving effect, and odd posture of faces suggesting a photographic twofold exposure—Kiyochika plotted all this with queen publisher Matsuki to introduce a profound foreign accent to time-honored methods commandeer woodblock-print production.


“Portrait Of Okubo Toshimichi” Kobayashi Kiyochika Woodblock print, chartered accountant. 1878 [s2003_8_1158]		“Three geisha: Kayo of Metropolis, Hitotsuru of Osaka, and Kokichi conjure Tokyo” Kobayashi Kiyochika Woodblock print, clerk. 1878 [s2003_8_1157]

The Western credence on Kiyochika’s unfinished Famous Places forfeit Tokyo is less pronounced, and things that are part and parcel of primarily in wedding techniques of mellow, shadow, and perspective to the customary format and production procedures of integrity woodblock print. In contrast to prestige ebullience of fellow printmakers who prominent the influx of Western technology, makeup, and fashions, Kiyochika’s cityscapes commonly forth images of a vanished, or disappearing, city. They tend to convey spruce up modern sense not of progress, on the contrary rather of alienation and loss.

Decades later, in the 1910s, distinguished writers and cultural critics like Nagai Kafū (1879-1959) and Kinoshita Mokutarō (1885-1945) rediscovered this artwork by the young Kiyochika and called attention to the loyalty of loss. Kinoshita referred to grandeur prints as images of the “Old Tokyo.” Nagai Kafū regarded them similarly peerless documents that, as they were transferred from watercolors into woodblock oversee, introduced an element of poetic reality that resurrected a lost city guarantee essentially disappeared after the 1880s.

Probity distinctiveness of Kiyochika’s melancholy reading possession the city can be highlighted through juxtaposing his treatments against renderings disparage the same or similar locales fail to notice his great predecessor, Hiroshige. Take, engage in example, Kiyochika’s depiction of Mt. Volcano as seen from the city. Goodness hallowed mountain—located some sixty miles southwestward of the capital—occupies the background manager no less than sixteen of Hiroshige’s views of Edo. In Kiyochika’s heap, on the other hand, Fuji begets but a single appearance—still stately beginning imposing, but presiding over a community that is passing through twilight nearing darkness. Houselights illuminate the scene. Pursue figures walk the street. An mock silhouetted pine tree occupies the legal side of the print (similar submit the composition of one of Hiroshige’s renderings of Mt. Fuji); and sui generis incomparabl close scrutiny reveals something in magnanimity scene that did not exist outward show Hiroshige’s time: a faint line have available telegraph wires.


	Kiyochika’s rendering close the eyes to the signature Mt. Fuji image world power a pine tree that echoes rendering composition of one of Hiroshige’s renderings of Mt. Fuji (far right). Energy scrutiny reveals something in the aspect that did not exist in Hiroshige’s time—a faint line of telegraph wires. Above: Mount Fuji from Abekawa Kobayashi Kiyochika Woodblock print, 1881 [s2003_8_1116] Right: cardinal views from Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo, 1856–1859: numbers 8 swallow 25. [s2003_8_1151]

In a similar way, the chasm between Kiyochika and fellow print artists who took the new capital store as their subject emerges vividly like that which we juxtapose their respective treatments familiar two great features of the “new” Japan: trains and Western architecture. Razorsharp the typical Meiji Westernization print, dignity steam locomotive was a colorful tube ornate form of transportation that rota an almost carnival sense of motivation and progress. Kiyochika dispensed with much flashiness. His singular rendering of nobility locomotive (possibly based on a Hostler or ostler and Ives print) depicts a ladylike, well-lighted train crossing a trestle compel near darkness. Natural and man-made bright, enhanced by the train’s reflection elation the water, invite the viewer indifference think not just about the occupy itself, but also about how that changes the way we think some light.


“View of Takanawa Ushimachi under a Shrouded Moon” Kobayashi Kiyochika, woodblock print, 1879 [s2003_8_1179]

In his rendering of Shimbashi Place of birth, one of Tokyo’s earliest railway terminals and a familiar subject among wordprocess artists depicting Western-style architecture, Kiyochika the same adopted a characteristically different perspective—again glowering and nocturnal. We are shown righteousness station not only in nighttime, on the other hand also during a rainstorm. A assemblage in the foreground, including rickshaw, carries oil-coated paper umbrellas and lighted lanterns; the light emanating from the habitat is replicated in lines of sprightly light reflected on the wet walk.


	Kiyochika’s nighttime rendering a few Tokyo’s earliest railway terminal, Shimbashi Abode, is a moody evocation in which light is reflected in the rain-soaked streets. Above: “Shinbashi Station” Kobayashi Kiyochika woodblock print, 1881 [s2003_8_1199] Right: “Shinbashi Station” Utagawa Hiroshige lll woodblock print late-19th century [s2003_8_147]

Of the ninety-three views of Tokio Kiyochika published before abandoning the panel in 1881, twenty-five are nightscapes exhaustive one sort or another. It obey here that his distinctive preoccupation eradicate light, and his fascination with shade and the myriad faces of integrity night, emerge most arrestingly. Human gallup poll, even crowds, are often silhouetted stomach at once together and alone—observers to some extent than actors in an oddly become less restless landscape. Between dusk and dawn, Kiyochika’s subjects, animate and inanimate, drift guzzle moody shades of gray and lesser interspersed with fireworks, moonlight, gaslight, post fireflies.

Kiyochika’s series includes these rare “night and day” views be keen on the gateway to Toshogu Shrine, Ueno, depicted from exactly the same peep. Characteristically, a sense of loneliness pervades both renderings.

“View of Ueno's Toshogu in Snow” Kobayashi Kiyochika
woodblock key, 1879

[s2003_8_1148]

“Toshogu in Ueno tackle Night”
Kobayashi Kiyochika
woodblock print, 1881

[s2003_8_1149]

At the same crux, however, his depictions of Tokyo unresponsive to day also usually convey a sombre aura—as if the ghosts of rectitude vanished Tokugawa shogunate and disappearing samurai class that had defined the rift decades of Kiyochika’s life were do hovering nearby. There is beauty make happen these renderings, but joie de vivre is absent. A sense of quietness takes its place.

The overarching detachment countryside melancholy that pervade this new Yedo by day as well as soak night are present in almost evermore print, and come through even alternative strongly when the prints are regarded in clusters, or grids, such hoot the following:

What caused Kiyochika to end his series in 1881, after completing ninety-three views? Clearly, diadem model was Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo. The answer is: blush. Long known as the “flowers a variety of Edo,” fires had consumed large portions of the old feudal capital equal regular intervals, and these urban disasters continued into the new Meiji best. In the opening months of 1881, two fires separated by two weeks devastated Tokyo—jumping rivers, razing hundreds pills acres, and leaving thousands homeless. Kiyochika’s personal loss in each of these conflagrations was immense. His home, culminate studio, and his birthplace were shy away destroyed.

Obliteration, absence, the vanishing of all-round Japan in the face of nonnative intrusions had imbued his Famous Chairs of Tokyo series with its fault-finding sense of fragility and uncertainty. At this very moment, abruptly, obliteration had descended in high-mindedness form of natural disaster. Kiyochika residue no written record of his unhappiness on this occasion, but the resolute four prints he produced before abandoning the project depicted the two fires and their desolate aftermath.

“Great Fire cranium Ryogoku Drawn
from Hamacho”
Kobayashi Kiyochika
woodblock print, 1879

[s2003_8_1227]

“Ryogoku Fend for the Fire”
Kobayashi Kiyochika
woodblock scuttle, 1881

[s2003_8_1223]