was a Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese painter and printmaker known for his advancement of the ukiyo-e

Ukiyo-e

' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...

 woodcut

Woodcut

Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

 style starting in the 1670s.

Early life and training

Moronobu was the son of a well-respected dyer and a gold and silver-thread embroiderer in the village of Hodamura, Awa Province

Awa Province (Chiba)

was a province of Japan in the area of modern Chiba Prefecture. It lies on the tip of the Boso Peninsula , whose name takes its first kanji from the name of Awa Province and its second from Kazusa and Shimōsa Provinces. Its abbreviated form name was or...

, near Edo Bay. After moving to Edo

Edo

, also romanized as Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of the Japanese capital Tokyo, and was the seat of power for the Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868...

, Moronobu, who had learned his father's craft, studied both Tosa

Tosa school

The Tosa school of Japanese painting was founded in the 15th century, and was devoted to yamato-e, which are paintings specializing in subject matter and techniques derived from ancient Japanese art, as opposed to schools influenced by Chinese art....

 and Kanō

Kano school

The ' is one of the most famous schools of Japanese painting. The Kanō school of painting was the dominant style of painting until the Meiji period.It was founded by Kanō Masanobu , a contemporary of Sesshū and student of Shūbun...

-style painting. He thus had a solid grounding in both decorative crafts and academic painting, which served him well when he then turned to ukiyo-e, which he studied with his mentor, the Kambun Master.

Work

His first known signed and dated works were book illustrations from 1672, although earlier works may yet surface. By the mid-1670s Moronobu had already become the most important ukiyo-e printmaker, a position he maintained until his death. He produced more than 100 illustrated books, perhaps as many as 150, though it is difficult to attribute to him many unsigned examples (for example, the scholar Kiyoshi Shibui established, in 1926, a basis for crediting some of the designs previously given to Moronobu as the work of Sugumura Jihei). Very few of Moronobu's single-sheet prints have survived, and most, if not all, are unsigned. Among these single sheets are erotic album prints.

Moronobu was not the "founder" of ukiyo-e, as some early scholars surmised. Instead, with Moronobu we find an impressive assimilation of inchoate ukiyo-e designs by previous artists, a consolidation of genre and early ukiyo-e painting and prints. It was Moronobu who created the first truly mature form of ukiyo-e, in a style of great strength and presence that would set the standards for generations of artists who followed. Moronobu's mastery of line has often been cited in assessments of his oeuvre, as well as his harmonious and interactive arrangements of figures, who seem always to serve a dramatic function not usually seen in the work of his predecessors.

Some of Moronobu's prints are found with hand coloring, but this specimen is a 'sumi-e' (print with black pigment only) in its original, uncolored state. There is something almost elemental in Moronobu's line work and figure placements in black and white, which most often was diminished into more decorative effects when colors were applied by hand. The black and gray lines and solid areas contrast boldly with the white paper to produce a range of tonal values, with emphasis on the shape and movement of the lines and the "positive" values of the white spaces. As in many other designs by Moronobu, the artist was inventive in his use of curvilinear forms juxtaposed against straight diagonals.

Groupings of 12 images had been common for centuries in court and genre paintings. Among the more famous surviving early specimens were the painted single sheets by the master Tosa Mitsunobu

Tosa Mitsunobu

was a Japanese painter, the founder of the Tosa school of Japanese painting. Born into a family that had traditionally served as painters to the Imperial court, he was head of the court painting bureau from 1493 to 1496. In 1518 he was appointed chief artist to the Ashikaga shogunates.- External...

 (1434-1525). Thus Moronobu's adoption of a grouping of 12 was conventional enough, particularly as such an arrangement afforded a context in which to alter the furnishings, clothing, and design patterns, matched more or less to the months of the year. However, it cannot be said that much 'shunga' strictly adhered to seasonal progressions or 12-step narratives. Moronobu's print qualifies as an 'abuna-e' ("risqué print"), a non-explicit erotic design of a type often found as the frontispiece to 'shunga' sets or occasionally interspersed among the explicit sheets. Moronobu's formalism is evident here, with curves and straight lines balanced in near perfect proportion. As for the amorous couple, the seduction has just begun with the loosening of the 'obi' (the woman's sash). Erotic signifiers enhance the scene. For example, the young beauty raises her right sleeve toward her mouth in a gesture of suppressed emotion. Water imagery evokes the woman's sexuality, with feminine or 'yin

Yin and yang

In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang , which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang", is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only...

' erotic symbols in the garden stream behind the lovers and in the waves on the robe of the young gallant, while the flowering ume

Ume

Prunus mume, with the common names including Chinese plum and Japanese apricot, is an Asian tree species classified in the Armeniaca section of the genus Prunus. The flower, long a beloved subject in the traditional painting of East Asia, is usually translated as plum blossom. This distinct tree...

 on the standing screen serves as a metaphor for male or 'yang

Yin and yang

In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang , which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang", is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only...

' sexuality.

He also made the Mikaeri Bijin, which means woman looking back.