Toyokuni I | Earth Sign of Muddy Water

Utagawa Toyokuni I(1769-1825)

The son of a dollmaker in Edo’s shiba district, Toyokuni was the first in a truly remarkable Ukiyoe lineage, with his designs and those of his students dominating the Utagawa school — and thus, the market for Japanese woodblock prints — for decades. His long list of students would eventually include Kunisada and Kuniyoshi.

His first works, as with so many artists in Japan, were illustrations in books, but he quickly demonstrated mastery of the bijin, or beautiful woman, print.

The leaders in this field were Utamaro and Kiyonaga, but soon after Toyokuni’s first bijin prints appeared in the 1790s, he’d developed his own style. Hollis Goodall, in Living for the Moment: Japanese Prints from the Barbara S. Bowman Collection, writes “he explored a less exaggerated figure length than those of Utamaro’s beauties, still longer and more robust than those of Kiyonaga, but showing greater angularity in pose and outline.”

In the end, Toyokuni produced 90 series and many hundreds more single-sheet designs. In his 30-year career he worked for more than 100 publishers, and also produced several paintings. His works live on, but perhaps even more so do the works of those he taught and encouraged.