Ishikawa Toyonobu

For most of Ishikawa Toyonobu's career, a Japanese print could carry only two or three colours. Full-colour woodblock printing did not yet exist, and around the middle of the 18th century Toyonobu was one of the busiest makers of what were called benizuri-e, prints worked up from a rose-pink and a green block over the black outline.

He had learned the trade from Nishimura Shigenaga, a printmaker who trained several of the era's names, and he built a steady output of actors and beautiful women in that limited palette. He kept another life beside it. Under the name Nukaya Shichibei he was the proprietor of a lodging house in Edo, present-day Tokyo, so prints were not his only living.

Then the ground shifted. In 1765 Suzuki Harunobu, a fellow designer, helped introduce the nishiki-e, the full-colour brocade print, and the two-colour work Toyonobu had mastered was suddenly old-fashioned. He stopped designing ukiyo-e prints shortly after and lived on quietly for another twenty years, dying in 1785.