(One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is a great work series of...)
One Hundred Aspects of the Moon is a great work series of the "Last Ukiyo-E Master " Yoshitoshi Tsukioka, whose work is widely addapted in the image of "mad and blood", but this work is created in his last years, full of calm and meditation.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi also named Taiso Yoshitoshi was a Japanese artist. He is widely recognized as the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock printing and painting. He is also regarded as one of the form's greatest innovators.
Background
Yoshitoshi Tsukioka was born in the Shimbashi district of old Edo (now Tokyo), in 1839. His original name was Owariya Yonejiro. His father was a wealthy merchant who had bought his way into samurai status. At the age of three years, Yoshitoshi left home to live with his uncle, a pharmacist with no son, who was very fond of his nephew. At the age of five, he became interested in art and started to take lessons from his uncle.
Education
In 1850, when Yoshitoshi Tsukioka was 11 years old, Yoshitoshi was apprenticed to Kuniyoshi, one of the great masters of the Japanese woodblock print. Kuniyoshi gave his apprentice the new artist's name "Yoshitoshi", denoting lineage in the Utagawa School.
During his training, Yoshitoshi concentrated on refining his draftsmanship skills and copying his mentor’s sketches. Kuniyoshi emphasized drawing from real life, which was unusual in Japanese training because the artist’s goal was to capture the subject matter rather than making a literal interpretation of it. Yoshitoshi also learned the elements of western drawing techniques and perspective through studying Kuniyoshi’s collection of foreign prints and engravings.
Career
Yoshitoshi's first print appeared in 1853, but nothing else appeared for many years, perhaps as a result of the illness of his master Kuniyoshi during his last years. Although his life was hard after Kuniyoshi's death in 1861, he did manage to produce some work, 44 prints of his being known from 1862. In the next two years he had sixty-three of his designs, mostly kabuki prints, published. He also contributed designs to the 1863 Tokaido series by Utagawa School artists organized under the auspices of Kunisada.
Many of Yoshitoshi's prints of the 1860s are depictions of graphic violence and death. These themes were partly inspired by the death of Yoshitoshi's father in 1863 and by the lawlessness and violence of the Japan surrounding him, which was simultaneously experiencing the breakdown of the feudal system imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate, as well as the effect of contact with Westerners. In late 1863, Yoshitoshi began making violent sketches, eventually incorporated into battle prints designed in a bloody and extravagant style. The public enjoyed these prints and Yoshitoshi began to move up in the ranks of ukiyo-e artists in Edo.
As he gained notoriety, Yoshitoshi was able to have ninety-five more of his designs published in 1865, mostly on military and historical subjects. Among these, two series would reveal Yoshitoshi’s creativity, originality, and imagination. The first series, Tsūzoku saiyūki ("A Modern Journey to the West"), is about a Chinese folk-hero. The second, Wakan hyaku monogatari ("One Hundred Stories of China and Japan"), illustrates traditional ghost stories. His imaginative prints set him apart from any other artist of the time.
Between 1866 and 1868 Yoshitoshi created some extremely disturbing images, notably in the series Eimei nijūhasshūku ("Twenty-eight famous murders with verse"). These prints show killings in very graphic detail, such as decapitations of women with bloody handprints on their robes. Other examples can be found in the strange figures of the 1866 series Kinsei kyōgiden, ("Biographies of Modern Men"), which depicted the power struggle between two gambling rings, and the 1867 series Azuma no nishiki ukiyo kōdan. In 1868, following the Battle of Ueno, Yoshitoshi made the series Kaidai hyaku sensō in which he portrays contemporary soldiers as historical figures in a semi-western style, using close-up and unusual angles, often shown in the heat of battle with desperate expressions.
By 1869, Yoshitoshi was regarded as one of the best woodblock artists in Japan. However, shortly thereafter, he ceased to receive commissions, perhaps because the public were tired of scenes of violence. By 1871, Yoshitoshi became severely depressed, and his personal life became one of great turmoil, which was to continue sporadically until his death. He lived in appalling conditions with his devoted mistress, Okoto, who sold off her clothes and possessions to support him. At one point they were reduced to burning the floor-boards from the house for warmth.
In the following year his fortunes turned, when his mood improved, and he started to produce more prints. Prior to 1873, he had signed most of his prints as "Ikkaisai Yoshitoshi". These were woodblock prints designed as full-page illustrations to accompany articles, usually on lurid and sensationalized subjects such as "true crime" stories. Yoshitoshi's financial condition was still precarious, however, and in 1876, his mistress Okoto, in a gesture of devotion, sold herself to a brothel to help him.
With the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, in which the old feudal order made one last attempt to stop the new Japan, newspaper circulation soared, and woodblock artists were in demand, with Yoshitoshi earning much attention. In late 1877, he took up with a new mistress, the geisha Oraku, like Okoto, she sold her clothes and possessions to support him, and when they separated after a year, she too hired herself out to a brothel.
Yoshitoshi's works gave him more public recognition, and the money was a help, but it was not until 1882 that he was secure.
An 1885 issue of the art and fashion magazine "Tokyo Hayari Hosomiki" ranked Yoshitoshi as the number-one ukiyo-e artist.
His last years were among his most productive, with his great series One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885-1892), and New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts (1889-1892), as well as some masterful triptychs of kabuki theatre actors and scenes. During this period he also cooperated with his friend, the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō, and others, in an attempt to preserve some of the traditional Japanese arts.
In his last years, his mental problems started to recur. In early 1891 he invited friends to a gathering of artists that did not actually exist, but rather turned out to be a delusion. His physical condition also deteriorated, and his misfortune was compounded when all of his money was stolen in a robbery of his home. After more symptoms, he was admitted to a mental hospital. He eventually left, in May 1892, but did not return home, instead renting rooms. He died three weeks later in a rented room, on June 9, 1892, from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 53 years old.
Tokaido Meisho no Uchi, "Maisaka", early Yoshitoshi seascape design from a collaborative series.
1863
Design from Yoshitoshi's well-known series of beautiful women Fuzoku Sanjuniso
(Design from Yoshitoshi's well-known series of beautiful w...)
1888
From Yoshitoshi's series of beautiful women Shinryu nijushi toki
(From Yoshitoshi's series of beautiful women Shinryu nijus...)
1880
Eimei nijūhasshūku
(from Twenty-eight famous murders with verse series)
1867
Inaba Mountain Moon
(100 Aspects of the Moon No. 7, "Inaba Mountain Moon" The ...)
1885
Seiriki Tamigorō committing suicide
(from Kinsei kyōgiden series)
1865
The Lonely House on Adachi Moor
1885
painting
Priest Raigo of Mii Temple
1891
The moon’s four strings
Theater-district dawn moon
Lune a Kasuga Yoshitoshi
The moon through a crumbling window
1887
Cooling off at Shijo
Cassia-tree moon
painting
The moon and the abandoned old woman
Kinto picks a plum branch in the moonlight
Personality
It is said that in 1872 he suffered a complete mental breakdown after being shocked by the lack of popularity of his recent designs.
Quotes from others about the person
His life is best summed up by John Stevenson: "Yoshitoshi's courage, vision and force of character gave ukiyo-e another generation of life, and illuminated it with one last burst of glory."
Connections
In 1880, he met another woman, a former geisha with two children, Sakamaki Taiko. They were married in 1884, and while he continued to philander, her gentle and patient temperament seems to have helped stabilize his behaviors. One of Taiko's children, adopted as a son, became Yoshitoshi's student, and was thence known as Tsukioka Kōgyo.