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New Forms of the Thirty-six Ghosts
New Forms of the Thirty-six Ghosts. Yoshitoshi · Public domain · source

Yoshitoshi

Public domain1839-1892·Japanese·printmaking·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Japanese woodblock print designer, born in Edo on 30 April 1839 and dead in Tokyo on 9 June 1892. Apprenticed at eleven to Utagawa Kuniyoshi, he worked through the fall of the shogunate and the opening of Japan, designing warriors, ghosts, beauties and newspaper illustrations.

Why they matter

He is regarded as the last great master of the traditional Japanese woodblock print and the most important pupil of Kuniyoshi. His early prints are full of graphic violence; his late series, above all One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, are quiet and poetic, and in 1885 an art magazine ranked him the first ukiyo-e artist of the day.

What to buy

Originals: this is one of the most realistic places to own a genuine Japanese print. Single sheets from the Moon series are the obvious start, and many designs remain within reach of a first-time collector, while the rare ones sit much higher. The catch is the edition. After his death the publisher Akiyama Buemon went on printing the Moon series from the original blocks, so a genuine Meiji sheet can be a lifetime or a posthumous impression. Early impressions carry the artist's name and address and the printing and publication dates in the left margin; later ones show broken lines from worn blocks and often brighter colour, and a trimmed margin can hide the evidence. Beware too that a search for "Yoshitoshi" also brings up Mori Yoshitoshi, a different, twentieth-century artist. Books: John Stevenson's Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is the standard work on the series. Stevenson estimates that two to three thousand impressions of the Moon prints, lifetime and posthumous together, were made.

Notes

The Art Institute of Chicago shows prints from his major late series online. His pupils included Mizuno Toshikata and Migita Toshihide, and he adopted Tsukioka Kogyo.

Story

By 1869 Yoshitoshi was counted among the best print designers in Japan. Then the commissions stopped. He fell into a deep depression and poverty, and in 1872 had a complete mental breakdown after his recent designs were poorly received. His mistress Okoto sold her clothes and belongings to keep him, and in 1876, with the two of them still poor, she sold herself to a brothel to support him. Yoshitoshi, meanwhile, had come back. In 1873 he changed the first part of his art name to Taiso, written with characters meaning "great resurrection". The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 increased the demand for newspaper prints, he married in 1884, and his last years were among his most productive. One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, issued a few designs at a time from 1885, was so popular that people queued before dawn for each new sheet and still found it sold out. Then the illness returned. He was admitted to a mental hospital in 1891, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage in June 1892, aged 53.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

The Met ↗Rijksmuseum ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Ukiyo-e.org ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Stevenson, One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

Fuji Arts ↗Scholten Japanese Art ↗eBay ↗

See also

Katsushika Hokusai 1760-1849Utagawa Hiroshige 1797-1858Kitagawa Utamaro 1753-1806Utagawa Kuniyoshi 1798-1861Suzuki Harunobu 1724-1770Utagawa Kunisada 1786-1865Keisai Eisen 1790-1848Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1864-1901

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