Page:The Surviving Works of Sharaku (1939).djvu/20

 the calendar year 1794. That year, we should add, had an extra intercalary month so that it contained thirteen months in all. The mystery of Sharaku remains,—in fact has become deeper; we have no new light to throw on what little was known of the blank years that preceded his sudden and violent burst of creative activity; and all we might add to the unproved theories of others regarding the blank years that followed would be equally unsubstantiated suppositions of our own. Details will be gone into later; but as this book is designed to accompany exhibitions of the surviving prints and drawings of the artist—originals where that is possible and photographs where it is not—many of those into whose hands it will come will not be familiar with previous writings on the subject and will wish a resumé of what is known about Sharaku himself, before they turn to more technical discussions and consider the new facts about his work that have been discovered in our recent researches.

Until only a very few years ago Japanese prints were regarded in the aristocratic and intellectual circles of Japan as entirely unworthy of notice. This was partly because they were produced in quantity by semi-mechanical means and partly because they were supposed to have no spiritual content but to express merely the vulgar tastes and vulgar interests of an upstart bourgeoisie. Another point urged against them was that the brush-work of the artist no longer could be judged or appreciated when his original design had been cut on a block and then printed. Prints were considered by the connoisseurs of painting to be as unoriginal and unrepresentative as we would consider the translation of a poem from one language into another and from that into a third. The popular theatre—Kabuki—fell under a similar ban of vulgarity; and although plays and prints were the passion of a very vital middle class, those who wrote subtle treatises on the recognized forms of art maintained comparative silence in regard to the masters—even in painting—of the light-hearted Ukiyoye or Genre School to which the print designers belonged, and disregarded the actors and dramatists who were the idols of the bourgeoisie. Even the class for whom they were made considered prints ephemeral things,—merely records for the moment of transitory styles and pleasures; and such lists as were compiled of the artists who made them give very little information about any of the masters and almost none at all about Sharaku, perhaps because the period of his work was of such exceedingly brief duration.

What little could be gleaned from contemporary or nearly