Page:A history of Japanese colour-prints by Woldemar von Seidlitz.djvu/214

 middle of the fifties, were red (beni), blue, and the newly added yellow, that is, colours resulting from the decomposition of the green hitherto used. Professor Jaekel, on the other hand, in a personal communication, is of opinion that the third colour was the result of blue being printed over red in the case of the caps of the actors, which appear to have been of a vivid violet; he is acquainted with such prints by Kiyonobu II., Kiyomitsu, and Kiyohiro. This third colour, a late introduction, was then, he thinks, at once generally made use of to enrich the colour-scheme in every direction.

The introduction of three-colour printing also brought the kakemono-ye to full perfection. The number of figures represented on them rose occasionally to eight or ten. The fact that one colour could now be printed over another made it possible to vary the colour-scheme almost infinitely.

Torii Kiyohiro, who, like Kiyomitsu, was active from about 1750 to 1765, was perhaps more gifted than the latter, but his achievement was less. The Hayashi Catalogue calls him a pupil of Shiro Kiyonobu (see under Kiyonobu II.). Fenollosa suspects that he was a younger brother of Kiyomitsu, but the fact that he published an illustrated book, Serifu, with five black and white prints, in Yedo, as early as 1738, is against this assumption. Another book, called Tomimoto, appeared in 1754, with eleven illustrations (Gillot Catalogue). For the rest, only two- and three-colour prints are known by him also, partly in the form of triptychs, with beautiful drawing of the patterns on the robes and tasteful application of a delicate olive-grey. Like Kiyomitsu, he affected especially the delineation of actors (illustrations in Hayashi Catalogue, Nos. 259, 263, 254). Tanaka Masunobu is mentioned by Fenollosa (Catalogue, No. 94) as a late pupil of Kiyonobu II. in his old age, who produced about the middle of the fifties actor prints in two colours. But there exists