Beauty Looking Back and Reading

The Torii school of artists traces its origins to Torii Kiyonobu (1664-?). From its inception, the school was closely tied to Edo kabuki, producing signboards for theater façades, illustrated playbills, and actor prints. This association with the theater has continued into the present, and the Torii lineage is now counted through nine generations. Kiyonobu worked across both actor prints and bijinga (pictures of beauties), assuming a key role in shaping early ukiyo-e alongside contemporaries of the Hishikawa and Kaigetsudō schools. Together with Torii Kiyomasu II—thought to have been his son or younger brother—he developed the bold, exaggerated linework known as “hyōtan-ashi mimizu-biki” (gourd-shaped legs, earthworm lines), a distinctive technique used to capture the dynamic performances of Ichikawa Danjūrō I in “aragoto” (bold and exaggerated acting style) roles. This graphic idiom became the hallmark of the Torii school.

While other lineages such as the Hishikawa, Kaigetsudō, Miyagawa, Katsukawa, and Utagawa schools rose and fell, the Torii school maintained its presence throughout the Edo period. Among its later masters, Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815), the fourth head of the school, is particularly renowned. He expanded the expressive range of the tradition, creating the innovative “degatari-zu” format in actor prints, which depicted not only actors but also narrators (tayū) and shamisen players, and introducing bijinga that portrayed elegantly proportioned, nearly eight-heads-tall female figures. Kiyonaga’s vision of female beauty was carried forward by later artists, most notably Kitagawa Utamaro, and exerted a lasting influence on the development of ukiyo-e.

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(References)
- Muto, Junko. “Shosei Torii Kiyomasu kō (A Study of Torii Kiyomasu I).” Ukiyo-e Geijutsu, no. 106, 1992.
- Yasuda, Gōzō. “Torii Kiyonobu・Kiyomasu ron (On Torii Kiyonobu and Kiyomasu).” Ukiyo-e Geijutsu, 1987–1988.
- Torii-ha no Yakusha-e (Actor Prints of the Torii School). Hiraki Ukiyo-e Foundation and Ricker Museum, 1972.