Iwasa Katsushige (active 1650-1673), was the son of Iwasa Matabei. His best known work is his Three Dancing Samurai. Katsushige shows the transition most clearly between the marked progression from the permissive (by the standards of the day) of the Kan'ei era (1624-1644) to lurid Fuzokuga E from their beginnings as classical Buddhist and Japanese Genre depictions such as Matabei in 1640-1650, which drifted over into the intense flaming world of Ukiyo-e by the time style of the Kambun Master had come into vogue in the 1660s.[7][9]
In Katsushige's lifetime, Japanese society changed vastly. Over his career, the most popular or acceptable painting style would shift from Fuzokuga painting styles, under the influence of the new artisan class as a result of the widening stabilising effects of the policies put in place by the Tokugawa, who helped end the Sengoku Jidai using stability to consolidate their control over the patchwork fiefs of Japan. As the capital and with it, power, shifted to the East toward the new Tokugawa Capital of Edo from Kyoto, culture significantly changed. The Hikone screen is a good example of how more permissive figure painting became in the Kanei era (1624-1644) in the aftermath. This era came with the implementation of Kabuki, and the proliferation of printed and painted materials such as Shikomi-e and Kakemono-e of compendiums now available in travelling lending libraries (foldout carts) which promoted the Japanese androgynous beauty, or Bijin and subsequent formalisation of the Bijin-ga genre in Japanese art from (1624-1673).
Whilst it is most likely that Katsushige was influenced by the oeuvre he was surrounded by, we do not know of his immediate formative tutors or even his whereabouts in these years. By estimation and guesswork to fill in the blanks, speculatively Katsushige may have been influenced like his father by the Kano school of art in his earlier years between 1640-1650, but certainly he certainly moved over to be influenced by the Ukiyo-e world in the second half of his lifetime and career as an artist himself, particularly in the evolution of the human figure in courtly painting during the Kanei era onto Kakemono by the 1650's, and as the recognisable Bijin in the 1660-1670s which was supported by the rise of the Chonin patronage of the Ukiyo-e genre.
Early Ukiyo-e in Print and Technology
By the 1640's with the beginning of Sakoku, Japan had a greater need to distinguish itself and as such beauty had come to have greater meaning under Wamono, which was used to push a national narrative of ethnocentric Japaneseness. By the 1650s, this emerged with new vigour in the push of art patronage by Merchants and the Bakufu who favoured uniquely 'Japanese' styles and tastes which saw an increase of the work of local Komin work. This informed the Kambun beauty standards, with Komin creating Shikomi-E, being work which greatly interested the Komin of the time, mostly courtesan beauties. This precursor to Ukiyo-e, built upon the Buddhist figures found in the Tosa schools Yamato-e Fuzokuga figures.
The transition from Fuzokuga-e to Ukiyo-e, was brought about during this period by the aforementioned Komin class.[6] In the time when Fuzokuga-e were produced, morals allowed for men to acceptably pine after other young adults and monastic boy crushes. In the time of Ukiyo-e, morals had moved to such a point that the Komin now catered for radically different clientele. That is that Komin and their clients were producing, consuming and engaging the acts depicted in Shunga and Wakashudo, proudly hanging Kakemono from the Tokonoma of their boy toys. It was this Ukiyo-e world which saw rapid shifts and a flowering in the production of Bijin-ga, as a medium and trope heavily favoured by the Ukiyo Komin painters.
We can clearly see here from the earlier work of Katsushige, is that whilst he was clearly a reknowned or painter of some merit; his work has survived intact after all for 300 years; he did not deviate heavily from the established classical painting styles of figures in Japanese painting schools in the first half of the 17th century. Whilst the faces here may not particularly seem like much, may I point you to the figure on the far left of the image. The 'samurai' in the black kosode has a particularly prominent pair of eyebrows in comparison to the eyebrows of his fellow Wakashu dancer on the far right. It is this small quirk in the detail which gives us a clue as to how Katsushige established his own artistic style, as this small quirk is an artistic license of sort in deviation from the established and simple facial features to my knowledge of other prominent artistic styles of the day. The eyebrows may emphasise that this is a man with particularly masculine features for example, or their wisdom perhaps, allowing the viewer a more personal connection with the figure by differentiating their facial features, albeit mildly.
The eyebrow deviation is interesting, because other prominent figure styles of the era emphasised uniform faces, in order to detract from the vanity of individualism or charm of an individual from overpowering the text accompanying images, which mostly at this time accompanied holy texts. Figures were there to encourage the reader to engage with the expected religious morals and virtues espoused by these texts and religious leaders, not to encourage vanity projects like Bijin Kakemono. The current example today may be religious comic strips and soft core porn. This changed drastically over Katsushige's career as a painter.
The Popular Culture Kambun Figure
Beautiful pictures prior to 1650 are practically nonexistent, and until Matabei, even portraiture was seen as almost tantamount to a simple exercise in vanity. This tradition stemmed from the depiction of the human figure in the Tosa and Kano schools, who depicted figures slightly differently. Tosa depicted figures in the Yamato-e format, that is scenes from everyday Japanese life or pseudo-/historical accounts. The Kano school depicted moreso the Fuzokuga style which incorporated Classical Chinese accounts and brush style painting in gold leaf.[7] These scenes were those which the upper Kuge classes venerated in their scenes of devout religious moral stories which accompanied Buddhist texts, and thus were not made for aesthetical consumption in a hedonistic or tasteful manner.
Instead, after Matabei introduced the idea of portraiture in an 'art for arts sake' manner by painting himself in 1650 on the basis of the appreciation of Tang Chinese figure painting, these gradually filtered into the Komin sphere as an acceptable art form to paint, given Matabei's high prestige as a court painter. After a development in the Manji era, by the Kambun era the ideal of the pursuit of Beautiful figures was a socially acceptable subject to paint. With a transfer over to the Chonin also afoot as the economy shifted from land to money based economy model, Chonin and Komin tastes also deemed the Beautiful figures amongs themselves as worthy of being recorded and with this, the Bijin-ga figure was born.
The Kambun beauty held fast to ideals about Buddhist beauty and mixed it in with more modern 17th century philosophy about the human figure of pious or historical figures in simple costume. Kosode often stuck to 2-3 colours, figures flowed but were not sensual, and depictions of beauties generally stuck to safe source materials to do so at first. It was deemed societally acceptable to paint subjects such as Maiko and Shikomi at first due to the fact that they were performers of the high arts, although by the end of the era the images certainly could be read in other more licentious ways. Androgynous figures were (and still are) also heavily in vogue for setting beauty standards.
Shikomi-E; or Young Dancer Preparation Pictures; allowed Komin to subtly depict the more sensual nature of the human figure in an acceptable format under the frowsty standards of the day. They were a gradual move from the tightly controlled religious images of figures seen as acceptable by prior societal standards, venturing out into the new artform of Bijin-ga. The Shikomi-e appeal as drawn in the Kambun Master (1660-1673) style derived from the emerging Iwasa style of merging the classical Chinese Tang painting styles and Qiyun aesthetical quality with contemporaneous Japanese painting styles of Yamato-e.[7][8] This arose from Japanese acceptability politics at court, which saw Classical Chinese beauty and aesthetics merge with Wamono, to form at first religious, then aesthetical, then beautiful depictions of the human figure.
This was a painting style which went alongside Kanazoshi ( Kana Books | 仮名草子 ) [popular / likely high circulation between 1630 - 1660] and Shunga (as we know it being popular from 1580-1660), thus developing societal beauty standards of acceptable Bijin-ga. These were both relatively new print formats for the masses, with the technology only being decades old in Japan, written by writers like Asai Ryoi (1612-1691) whose characters frequented brothels, just like his intended audience. Indeed, it was Ryoi whose Ukiyo Monogatari ( Tales of the Floating World | 1666) encouraged and popularised the Kambun Heimin hedonistic lifestyle which came to be known as Ukiyo-e.[10] These soft core and danger-pictures of Kanazoshi were the precursor to Saikaku (1642-1693), who would go on to form the Ukiyo-zoushi ( Floating world Books | 浮世草子 ) genre from 1680-1770.[11]
Katsushige's Contribution
The surviving works of Katsushige are interesting, as they acquiesce certain secrets about Kambun KTC beauty standards, the arrival of Furisode as we know them and how these intersect with Ukiyo-e. KanKTC was particularly transgressive, being the end-labours of the Komin and Chonin castes. This particular work above for example, shows how the Furisode, a garment which had evolved from the 1550s as a garment for samurai people, to by the 1670s have sleeves long enough to trail along the floor worn by the young as a symbol of their decadent and lavish youth.
Katsushiges personal contribution here provides again, a more personal or unique face. The rest of the image is predictably of its time. The Kosode kept to a simple colour scheme, the posture a well worn Shikomi-E standard, and the proportions, focus and subject matter standard for the time. In terms of development of his style over the decades here, Katsushige clearly though has fallen into the Ukiyo-e crowd, or that beauty standards at the least had become heavily reliant on the 'lower' classes taste to inform popular cultural opinion on wider societal beauty standards by the end of the Kambun era, which had deemed figures by then to fall more into the realm of the Beautiful Lover trope which Komin often favoured then.
The Kojin Bijin
In a Confucian manner, Katsushige has refined his fathers work into a more distinct set of motifs and tropes. Therefore in context, we see how Katsushiges' Bijin followed in the ouevre of his father, carrying their own facial expressions and sybaritic Kimono, free flowing Kosode and Kitsuke than in Matabei's comparatively stiff figures. The facial expressions and features being the most striking difference, as Katsushige's features are defined and clearly more solid than those of his father, as representative of the times (Kanei and Kambun) each drew in.
Perhaps the key difference here though, is that by the second half of Katsushige's career, Katsushige was operating in the world of early Ukiyo-e. A world which Matabei's work whilst a portraiture prototype was certainly not as lurid as the Shunga then beginning to be produced en masse, and informed by the popular masses rather than at the whims of court nobles and their high brow art friends. It is in this vein, that we see that Katsushige formed his own pre-cursor beauty, the Kojin Bijin (individual personal beauty), reflecting the shift in how the human figure in Japanese art from Court painters in the Kanei to Komin painters by the Kambun saw and understood the human figure in aesthetical merits. Matabei being a Buddhist court painter, and Katsushige being an elevated Ukiyo-e painter, in the era which gave rise to the Bijin-ga genre aesthetic under the patronage of the lower class artist and their subject matters by the Enpo era (1673-1681).
Bibliography.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lan_Caihe
[2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-08-05/Would-magpies-help-reunite-China-s-mythological-lovers--IUw0yXfUL6/index.html
[3] https://asianbotanical.ku.edu/plum-0
[4] https://propertyinsight.com.my/why-does-vmgzcs/sparrow-symbolism-japan-24ab02
[5] https://www.christies.com/features/5-Victorian-beauties-and-what-they-tell-us-about-the-time-in-which-they-were-painted-6799-1.aspx
[6] See Essay #8
[7] See Bijin #1
[8] See Bijin #7
[9] See Bijin #6
[10] Views of the Floating World, Money L. Hickman, 1978, Vol. 76, p.5, MFA Bulletin
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukiyo-z%C5%8Dshi
Bijin Series Timeline
8th century
- Introduction of Chinese Tang Dynasty clothing (710)
- Sumizuri-e (710)
- Classical Chinese Art ; Zhou Fang (active 766-805) ; Qiyun Bijin
15th century
- Fuzokuga Painting schools; Kano (1450-1868) and Tosa (1330-1690)
16 century
- Nanbanjin Art (1550-1630)
- Byobu Screens (1580-1670)
- End of Sengoku Jidai brings Stabilisation policy (1590-1615)
17th century
- Land to Currency based Economy Shift (1601-1655)
- Early Kabuki Culture (1603-1673) ; Yakusha-e or Actor Prints
- Sumptuary legislation in reaction to the wealth of the merchant classes (1604-1685)
- Regulation of export and imports of foreign trade in silk and cotton (1615-1685)
Iwasa Matabei (active 1617-1650) ; Yamato-e Bijin
- Sankin-Kotai (1635-1642) creates mass Urbanisation
- Popular culture and print media production moves from Kyoto to Edo (1635-1650); Kiyohara Yukinobu (1650-1682) ; Manji Classical Beauty
- Shikomi-e (1650-1670) and Kakemono-e which promote Androgynous Beauties;
Iwasa Katsushige (active 1650-1673) ; Kojin Bijin
- Mass Urbanisation instigates the rise of Chonin Cottage Industry Printing (1660-1690) ; rise of the Kabunakama Guilds and decline of the Samurai
- Kanazoshi Books (1660-1700); Koshokubon Genre (1659?-1661)
- Shunga (1660-1722); Abuna-e
Kanbun Master/School (active during 1661-1673) ; Maiko Bijin
- Hinagata Bon (1666 - 1850)
Yoshida Hanbei (active 1664-1689) ; Toned-Down Bijin
- Asobi/Suijin Dress Manuals (1660-1700)
- Ukiyo-e Art (1670-1900)
Hishikawa Moronobu (active 1672-1694) ; Wakashu Bijin
- The transit point from Kosode to modern Kimono (1680); Furisode, Wider Obi
- The Genroku Osaka Bijin (1680 - 1700) ; Yuezen Hiinakata
Sugimura Jihei (active 1681-1703) ; Technicolour Bijin
Miyazaki Yuzen (active 1688-1736) [Coming Soon]
Torii Kiyonobu (active 1698 - 1729) [Coming Soon]
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