Ishikawa Toyonobu

Who was Ishikawa Toyonobu?

Ishikawa Toyonobu was a Japanese ukiyo-e print artist. He is sometimes said to have been the same person as Nishimura Shigenobu, a contemporary ukiyo-e artist and student of Nishimura Shigenaga about whom very little is known.

A pupil of Nishimura Shigenaga, Toyonobu produced many monochrome "lacquer prints" which reflected the influence of Okumura Masanobu as well. Many of these were yakusha-e and bijinga, including images of standing courtesans, whose faces conveyed an impassivity typical of the works of the Kaigetsudō school.

Toyonobu also experimented with semi-nude forms, something his chief predecessors also did, but never succeeded in developing it into a trend or sub-genre within ukiyo-e. Art historian Richard Lane points out that these images, depicting women with the top half of their kimono open and let down to reveal their chests, were intended as suggestive and erotic, and were not "glorification of the human form such as we find in Greek art."

Later in his career, Toyonobu became one of the leading producers of color prints, chiefly benizuri-e, but stopped producing ukiyo-e shortly after Suzuki Harunobu pioneered the full-color print in 1765.