Posted by Hans Olof Johansson (81.224.173.143) on January 04, 2006 at 10:59:15:
In Reply to: Expulsion of Yoshitora by Kuniyoshi posted by Andrew on December 15, 2005 at 18:53:55:
Andrew,
As nobody else seems to have any information to contribute, I've tried doing a little research.
Utagawa Yoshitora was a prolific artist and a very popular print designer. Still we know very little about him and his life. We don't know when or where he was born or when he died. The only dates that are usually given about him is that he was active from ca 1850 to ca 1880.
In fact he started designing prints long before 1850. Looking through some 400 reproductions of prints of his the last few days, I found at least two with kiwame seals, dating them to 1842 or earlier, and also some (without censor seals) that I would say stylistically belong to the late 1830s.
If I interpret the biographical entry about Yoshitora in "Genshoku ukiyo-e daihyakka jiten" correctly, he started making illustrations for picture books already in 1836. This seems to have been his main field of work for a long period, but at least from about 1840 he also designed single sheet prints and triptychs in the style of Kuniyoshi, who was his teacher.
As for his alleged expulsion from Kuniyoshi's studio, it is mentioned briefly in some reference works, but I haven't found many details. According to "Genshoku ukiyo-e daihyakka jiten" it happened after Yoshitora in 1849 was sentenced to 50 days in handcuffs for designing a print that infringed the very strict censorship laws of that era.
The title of the print is said to be "Dogai musha - Miyo no wakamochi" (道外武者御代の若餅 - see http://www.enpaku.waseda.ac.jp/db/enpakunishik/results-1.php?gadai=%A1%D6%C6%BB%B3%B0%C9%F0%BC%D4%B8%E6%C2%E5%A4%CE%BC%E3%CC%DF%A1%D7&Max=30), depicting Tokugawa Ieyasu and his warriors in the process of making rice cakes - apparently not a deed heroic enough for the shogunate.
If that print was the reason for the expulsion is not quite clear, and I don't know if he rejoined Kuniyoshi's studio or not. As far as I can tell from the prints I've studied, Yoshitora carried on with his work in the 1850s very much along the same lines as he had done in the second half of the 1840s. There may perhaps have been a period of one or two years, when he wasn't able to work as much as before or after - mostly you can't tell if a certain print was designed and published before or after the 1849 incident - but the great bulk of his print production definitely lies after 1850.
After Kuniyoshi's death in 1861, Yoshitora joined Kunisada for the production of a "ôkubi-e" series of actors' portraits (see http://optometry.berkeley.edu/~fiorillo/texts/ukiyoetexts/ukiyoe_pages/yoshitora3.html), but like many other followers of Kuniyoshi, Yoshitora marked his loyalty to his teacher by occasionally using the "Kiri" seal with his signature in the mid-1860s.
Best regards,
Hans Olof