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Overview
Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865) was the most popular and prolific designer of ukiyo-e in 19th century Japan. He is estimated to have produced between 20,000 and 25,000 designs for woodblock prints during his lifetime. His reputation was clinched when he was in his early twenties; it was as great as that of his teacher Toyokuni I, and lifelong. This print dates from mid-career when Toyokuni II, the designated heir and evidently an artistically inferior artist/ son in law of Toyokuni I, was still alive. Kunisada / Toyokuni III was, as Frank Whitford says, ‘a proud man’. His status was largely unchallenged in his lifetime, though his reputation was long unfairly neglected because of cyclical attitudes to Japanese prints. Whitford recognised this early on: ‘Perhaps because of his huge output… Kunisada has not been treated well by the historians of ukiyo-e, although much of his work… reached the highest standards.’ His reputation was rescued considerably later than those of Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi, really only dating from the 1990s through the scholarship of Jan van Doesburg and Sebastian Izzard. Kunisada showed the versatility typical of print designers; while best known for his depictions of kabuki and his yakusha-e actor prints, as here, he was also a specialist in bijin-ga (beautiful women), illustrations from The Tales of Genji and more luxurious surimono prints.
Kunisada completed several series of yakusha-e depicting standing actors with swords, in some instances with shakuhachi bamboo flutes in 1815, and then again in 1832. This work is from the later double-ōban sheet series; Kunisada employed the gō (name) Kōchōrō between 1825 and 1861, but mainly during the 1830s. The actor’s striking pose, feet at ‘first position’, body twisting to the left and arms poised ready for action, draws on previous Katsukawa school graphic conventions for the dramatic mie pose of the kabuki stage. The juxtaposition of the mottled end of the shakuhachi and the saya scabbard behind the actor’s hip to the left of the composition remind Kunisada’s viewers of the tension between samuraibun (cultural) and bu(military) functions. The most striking feature of the works in this series is the emphasis on the actors’ mon in their costumes – here the hishi or bishi rhomboid shape of a well head, a motif also associated with the water chestnut. The bishi mon is not included in summary compilations of actor mon, but it appears on the sleeve of an actor in the central panel of a later Kunisada print (signed Toyokuniga) in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, US. Together with the better-known mimasu mon of three concentric squares, the bishi mon is closely identified with actors of the Ichikawa family, initiated by Danjūrō II.
In late February 1832, the Danjūrō name was transferred from Ichikawa Danjūrō VII to his eldest son, Ichikawa Danjūrō VIII, who held it from March 1832 to August 1854. It was also in 1832 that the Ichikawa family gained control over the popular kabuki play Sukeroku yukari Edozakura – usually known in English as The Flower of Edo. The character of Sukeroku (or Soga no Gorō) is recognisable here by his staunch, nonchalant pose – standing erect, rolling his sleeves up for a fight – and his attributes of swords and the shakuhachi bamboo flute. Kunisada employed the construct in a number of Danjūrō/Sukeroku compositions. Sukeroku was well known for his disposition to fighting, but also for the sincerity of his love for the Yoshiwara yūjo Agemaki.The juxtapositions of belligerence and tenderness, and of blade and shakuhachi, reflect the relation between the bu (military) and bun (cultured) samurai functions in which, during the peaceful Edo period, the bun function had predominated.
Sources:
David Bell, 'Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 30 (2019), pp. 56-81.
Frank Whitford, Japanese Prints and Western Painters (London, 1977).
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2019