The early inspirer of Utamaro’s genius was Kiyonaga, who had restored the glory of the school of Torii—the printer’s branch of Ukiyo-ye, which had sunk into temporary oblivion under the waning powers of Kiyomitsu. The atelier of Kiyonaga became the sanctuary of the artists of Ukiyo-ye, who, upon entering, forsook their individual traditions. There worshipped Toyokuni of Utagawa; Yeishi, the scion of classic and aristocratic Kano; and at the master’s feet sat the Young Utamaro, absorbing his methods until, in his early compositions, said M. de Goncourt, the technique and mannerisms of Kiyonaga “saute aux yeux.” The influence of Kiyonaga pervades his most beautiful work; but later, under a life of constant self-indulgence, amongst associations all tending to demoralization, his genius suffered an eclipse. His loss of self-control affected his art, until the sweeping lines and noble contours which his brush had acquired in the atelier of Kiyonaga were lost or widely travestied into a “delirium of female tallness.” In these wild flights his brother artists followed in headlong pursuit, and the contagion of the movement swept the studios of Paris. In the modern poster we see the degenerate offspring of the genius of Utamaro, and of Toyokuni. Professor Fenollosa said, “The generation of Aubrey Beardsley prefer these tricks to the sober grace of Harunobu, Kiyonaga and Koriusai.” It is art born of excess, a “Zolaism in prints.” The horrors of diseased imagination, the visions begotten of absinthe, which blot the brilliant pages of De Maupassant and the verse of Paul Verlaine, were reflected by Utamaro in his studies of the loathsome and the abnormal, where Montaigne declares, “L’esprit faisant le cheval eschappé, enfante des chimères.” The blasphemous impieties of this culte, deplored by all true Frenchmen, in the country of Hugo and Molière, were distanced by Utamaro, who suborned his art, his cynical brush caricaturing under the distorted figures of noted courtesans the saints and sages of the sacred Buddhist legends. Trading upon his vast popularity, he issued a pictorial satire upon one of the famous Shoguns, but this act of lèse-majesté brought him into disfavour with the reigning Shogun, the Louis XV of Japan, an artistic voluptuary, like his prototype, the subject of Utamaro’s cartoon, and the artist was condemned and cast into prison. From his cell the gay butterfly of the Yoshiwara emerged, spent and enfeebled, daring no more flights of fancy, and dying in 1806, before he reached his fiftieth year, from the effects of his confinement and the misuse of pleasure.