was a designer of ''

ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...

Japanese woodblock prints Woodblock printing in Japan (, ''mokuhanga'') is a technique best known for its use in the ''ukiyo-e'' artistic genre of single sheets, but it was also used for printing books in the same period. Widely adopted in Japan during the Edo period (160 ...

and an illustrator of books and newspapers who was active from about 1850 to about 1880. He was born in

Edo Edo ( ja, , , "bay-entrance" or "estuary"), also romanized as Jedo, Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of Tokyo. Edo, formerly a ''jōkamachi'' (castle town) centered on Edo Castle located in Musashi Province, became the ''de facto'' capital of ...

(modern Tokyo), but neither his date of birth nor date of death is known. However, he was the oldest pupil of

Utagawa Kuniyoshi Utagawa Kuniyoshi ( ja, 歌川国芳, ; January 1, 1798 – April 14, 1861) was one of the last great masters of the Japanese ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints and painting.Nussbaum, Louis Frédéric ''et al'' (2005). "Kuniyoshi" in He was a ...

who excelled in prints of warriors,

kabuki is a classical form of Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily-stylised performances, the often-glamorous costumes worn by performers, and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers. Kabuki is thought to ...

actors, beautiful women, and foreigners (

Yokohama-e are Japanese woodblock prints depicting non- East Asian foreigners and scenes in the port city of Yokohama. The port of Yokohama was opened to foreigners in 1859, and ukiyo-e artists, primarily of the Utagawa school, produced more than 800 diff ...

). He may not have seen any of the foreign scenes he depicted.Roberts, Laurance P. (1976). ''A Dictionary of Japanese Artists: Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Prints, Lacquer,'' p. 204. Yoshitora was prolific: he produced over 60 print series and illustrated over 100 books. In 1849 he produced an irreverent print called ''Dōke musha: Miyo no wakamochi'' ("Funny Warriors—Our Ruler's New Year's Rice Cakes"), which depicts

Oda Nobunaga was a Japanese ''daimyō'' and one of the leading figures of the Sengoku period. He is regarded as the first "Great Unifier" of Japan. Nobunaga was head of the very powerful Oda clan, and launched a war against other ''daimyō'' to unify ...

Akechi Mitsuhide , first called Jūbei from his clan and later from his title, was a Japanese ''samurai'' general of the Sengoku period best known as the assassin of Oda Nobunaga. Mitsuhide was a bodyguard of Ashikaga Yoshiaki and later a successful general under ...

, and

Toyotomi Hideyoshi , otherwise known as and , was a Japanese samurai and ''daimyō'' (feudal lord) of the late Sengoku period regarded as the second "Great Unifier" of Japan.Richard Holmes, The World Atlas of Warfare: Military Innovations that Changed the Cour ...

making ''

mochi is a Japanese rice cake made of , a short-grain japonica glutinous rice, and sometimes other ingredients such as water, sugar, and cornstarch. The rice is pounded into paste and molded into the desired shape. In Japan, it is traditionally ma ...

'' rice cakes for the shōgun

Tokugawa Ieyasu was the founder and first ''shōgun'' of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, which ruled Japan from 1603 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. He was one of the three "Great Unifiers" of Japan, along with his former lord Oda Nobunaga and fellow ...

. A poem by Sawaya Kōkichi accompanies it, reading "Kimi ga yo wo tsuki katametari haru no mochi" ("Tamping down the reign firm and solid like spring rice cakes"). Censors interpreted the print as a criticism of authority and had Yoshitora manacles for fifty days. Soon after Yoshitora was expelled from Kuniyoshi's studio, possibly due to the print, but he continued to produce illustrations prolifically. From the 1860s Yoshitora produced Yokohama-e pictures of foreigners amid rapid modernization that came to Japan after the country was opened to trade. He collaborated on a number of landscape series, and in the

Meiji period The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization ...

that began in 1868 he also worked in newspapers. The last of his known works appeared in 1882. File:Utagawa Yoshitora (1860) English Couple (crop).jpg, Utagawa Yoshitora (1860) English Couple File:Utagawa Yoshitora, Paris, France, 1862.jpg, Utagawa Yoshitora, Paris, France, 1862 File:Shogun-Tokugawa-Ieyasu.png, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu File:Miyo no wakamochi.jpg, Miyo no wakamochi File:Signatures of Utagawa Yoshitora reading from left- Ichimosai Yoshitora ga, Kinchoro Yoshitora ga and Mosai Yoshitora ga.jpg, Signatures of Utagawa Yoshitora reading from left to right:
•
•
• File:NDL-DC 9369963-083 Utagawa Yoshitora crd.jpg File:DP148075.jpg, London File:France (furansukoku).jpg, France, painted in 1865

Notes

References

* Lane, Richard. (1978). ''Images from the Floating World, The Japanese Print.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press.
OCLC 5246796
* * * Roberts, Laurance P. (1976). ''A Dictionary of Japanese Artists: Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Prints, Lacquer.'' New York: Weatherhill.
OCLC 185975982

External links

19th-century Japanese people Ukiyo-e artists Yoshitora {{Japan-artist-stub