page_title: Utagawa Toyoharu
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Utagawa Toyoharu / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Perspective Print: Fireworks Like Flowers in Bloom at Ryōgoku Bridge in the Eastern Capital (Edo日本語: 新版浮絵 東都両国橋繁花の図 歌川豊春画
context_page_description: Utagawa Toyoharu was a Japanese artist in the ukiyo-e genre, known as the founder of the Utagawa school and for his uki-e pictures that incorporated Western-style geometrical perspective to create a sense of depth.
  Born in Toyooka in Tajima Province, Toyoharu first studied art in Kyoto, then in Edo, where from 1768 he began to produce designs for ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He soon became known for his uki-e "floating pictures" of landscapes and famous sites, as well as copies of Western and Chinese perspective prints. Though his were not the first perspective prints in ukiyo-e, they were the first to appear as full-colour nishiki-e, and they demonstrate a much greater mastery of perspective techniques than the works of his predecessors. Toyoharu was the first to make the landscape a subject of ukiyo-e art, rather than just a background to figures and events. By the 1780s he had turned primarily to painting. The Utagawa school of art grew to dominate ukiyo-e in the 19th century with artists such as Utamaro, Hiroshige, and Kuniyoshi.
context_section_description: The popularity of Toyoharu's work peaked in the 1770s.  By the 19th century, Western-style perspective techniques had ceased to be a novelty and had been absorbed into Japanese artistic culture, deployed by such artists as Hokusai and Hiroshige, two artists best remembered for their landscapes, a genre Toyoharu pioneered.
  The Utagawa school that Toyoharu founded was to become one of the most influential, and produced works in a far greater variety of genres than any other school.  His students included Toyokuni and Toyohiro; Toyohiro worked in the style of his master, while Toyokuni, who headed the school from 1814, became a prominent and prolific producer of yakusha-e prints of kabuki actors.  Other well-known members of the school were Utamaro, Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, and Kunisada.  Though Japanese art schools, such as the Katsukawa in ukiyo-e and the Kanō in painting, emphasized a uniformity of style, a general style in the Utagawa school is not easy to recognize aside from a concern with realism and facial expressiveness.  The school dominated ukiyo-e production by the mid-19th century, and most of the artists—such as Kobayashi Kiyochika—who documented the modernization of Japan during the Meiji period during ukiyo-e's declining years belonged to the Utagawa school.
  The Torii school lasted longer, but the Utagawa school had more adherents.  It fostered closer master–student relations and more systematized training than in other schools.  Excepting a few prominent examples, such as Hiroshige or Kuniyoshi, the later generations of artists tended to lack stylistic diversity, and their work has become emblematic of ukiyo-e's decline in the 19th century.
  Toyoharu also taught painting. His most prominent student was Sakai Hōitsu.
  As of 2014, studies into Toyoharu's work have not been carried out in depth.  Cataloguing and analyzing his work and his and his publishers' seals was still in its infancy.
caption: Fireworks at Ryōgoku Bridge
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