Utagawa Toyohiro

Who They Were

Utagawa Toyohiro (歌川豊広) was a Japanese painter, print designer and illustrator of the Edo period, the long stretch of Japanese history running from 1603 to 1868. He was born in 1773, in the second year of the An'ei era (安永, a nengō or era name used from 1772 to 1781), and died in 1828. His birth name was Okajima Tōjiro.

Toyohiro belonged to the Utagawa school, the most commercially successful lineage of ukiyo-e artists in Edo-period Japan. Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) means "pictures of the floating world" — woodblock prints and paintings of city life, theatre, beauties and landscapes, produced in enormous numbers for a paying urban audience. Toyohiro studied under Utagawa Toyoharu, the founder of the school, and worked in and around Shiba, a district of Edo, the city now called Tokyo.

His output ranged widely: landscape series, scenes of daily activity in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, collaborative print series made with his contemporary Toyokuni, and book illustrations, which occupied much of his later career.

Life and Career

Toyohiro trained in the studio of Utagawa Toyoharu, the painter and printmaker who founded the Utagawa school and who is credited with adapting Western-style perspective to Japanese printmaking. From this workshop Toyohiro absorbed both the commercial discipline of ukiyo-e production and an interest in spatial depth and landscape that would shape his own work.

He built his reputation on landscape. Among his series are several versions of Eight Views of Edo and several of Eight Views of Ōmi — the "eight views" format being a classic subject list, originally Chinese, that Japanese artists returned to again and again. He also produced Newly Published Perspective Pieces (Shinpan uki-e), a series whose title announces its use of perspective, the technique associated with his teacher.

Alongside landscapes, Toyohiro depicted the Yoshiwara, the licensed entertainment quarter of Edo, in a series showing a day in the life of a geisha, and in an untitled series of Eight Views of Edo in the Snow. He worked on joint projects with Toyokuni, including Twelve Months by Two Artists, Toyokuni and Toyohiro (Toyokuni Toyohiro ryōga jūnikō), and produced an important group of ukiyo-e triptychs with him. Other series include The Six Great Poets, The Twelve Hours, The Four Accomplishments and The Three Cities.

In his later years, book and e-hon illustrations — e-hon (絵本) being illustrated books — took up much of his time. He had a son, Utagawa Toyokiyo, who also became an artist.

Why They Matter

Toyohiro's place in art history rests on two things: his own landscape work, and his teaching.

As a landscape designer he helped establish the subject as a serious pursuit within ukiyo-e, at a time when portraits of actors and courtesans dominated the market. His stylistic features fed directly into the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the two artists whose landscape prints became the most famous Japanese images in the world.

Hiroshige was Toyohiro's student. He came to the studio as a prodigy and went on to become one of the finest landscape artists Japan has produced. The line from Toyohiro's landscape series to Hiroshige's celebrated views of Edo and the Tōkaidō road is direct and personal: it runs through the workshop, not merely through a shared fashion.

Toyohiro's collaborations with Toyokuni also matter. Jointly signed series were a feature of the Utagawa school's output, and the Toyokuni–Toyohiro partnership produced work that neither artist would have made alone.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 歌川豊広. It is read in kana as うたがわ とよひろ, and romanised as Utagawa Toyohiro. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

Breaking it down character by character:

歌 — read uta here. It means "song" or "poem". This is the first element of the school name Utagawa.

川 — read gawa here (the base reading is kawa, voiced to gawa in compounds). It means "river". Together, 歌川 (Utagawa) is literally "song river" — a name borne by the whole school of artists descended from Toyoharu.

豊 — read toyo here. It means "abundant", "rich" or "bountiful". This character was inherited from the master's own name, Toyoharu: Utagawa school students traditionally took one element of the founder's name as the first part of their own art name.

広 — read hiro here. It means "wide", "broad" or "spacious". This is the element that distinguishes Toyohiro from his fellow students.

So the full name means something like "Abundant and Broad of the Song River [school]". The structure is worth remembering: in Edo-period art names, the surname identifies the school, and the given name usually contains a syllable granted by the master. A student's name was therefore a record of who he had studied under.

Legacy

Toyohiro died in 1828. His son, Utagawa Toyokiyo, carried the family's connection to the Utagawa school forward as an artist in his own right.

His most durable legacy is his pupil. Hiroshige's landscape prints — the views of Edo, the stations of the great highways — grew out of the training and the example Toyohiro provided, and they went on to shape how the entire world pictures Japan.

Toyohiro's own prints and illustrated books remain the record of a working Edo artist: landscape series, Yoshiwara scenes, collaborative triptychs with Toyokuni, and the e-hon illustrations of his final years. Through the Utagawa school's teaching line, his influence reached far beyond the works signed with his own name.