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selves with their vanity, and the public who adored them, were so offended by Sharaku’s delineations that the satirist was forced, after not more than about three years of activity, to cease making prints and to spend the remainder of his life in obscurity—perhaps on the country estates rather than in the city entourage of his feudal lord. Some years ago one of the compilers of the present catalogue attempted to explain the psychology of Sharaku and to describe his art with the legend in mind, and wrote as follows:
“The popular theatre was scorned—as prints were scorned—by all save the middle class townsmen; the aristocrats, in the seclusion of their palaces, had the Nō dramas of exceedingly abstruse meaning and lofty moral tone that were danced and chanted before hushed audiences of scholars. Sharaku was a professional Nō dancer in the service of one of the great nobles, and he appears in his maturity to have come suddenly and for the first time into contact with the theatre of the people. It is as though some cloistered Fellow of Oxford, who had given his life to playing Aeschylus and Sophocles there, should have witnessed a series of amateur nights in vaudeville. He saw the commonness of common men, their bestiality, their small conceit, their stupidity; he saw the animal characteristics in them so clearly that he would have been an excellent illustrator of Aesop or of Gulliver’s Travels—the comparison with Swift is rather apt; and, in spite of rays of somewhat ironic humor that gleam occasionally from his portraits, he drew them in the main with savage scorn, with that blind bitterness which is the child of disillusion. He reveals the plebeian actors as Goya revealed the Spanish Bourbons—but there is this vast difference: Sharaku was able to let himself go, Goya was not. One can imagine what the actors themselves thought of these pictures; but in any case portraits of popular idols drawn in this vein are not likely to prove popular, and after two years of the uninterrupted production of masterpieces Sharaku ceased to make prints.”
The legend had something to commend it—at least from the point of view of the West, but it did not take into account the definite possibility that Lord Hachisuka may very well have told Sharaku that association with the outcast actors and depiction of them were entirely unsuitable occupations for a man in his position; and in eighteenth century Japan one did not disobey his feudal lord. Other things that the legend failed to consider were the facts that during his brief activity Sharaku made portraits of actors appearing in all three of the most important theatres of the Tokugawa capital, and that the very existence of second states of some of his most satiric prints seems sufficient to attest a demand for them.
The legend is correct in its statement that the more “savagely satiric”
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