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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 and was as great as that of his teacher Toyokuni I. His status remained largely unchallenged in his lifetime, though later he 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’s print entitled Morishita is the left-hand sheet from a diptych series Tōkaidō gojusan-tsugi no uchi (The 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō). The hamlet of Morishita in the upper background of this print is not itself a station town; it is a thinly-veiled reference to the historical figure Mori Ranmasu (the romantic name of Mori Naritoshi, 1565–82), on whom the kabuki character Hori Ranmaru Nagayasu was based. Mori was an attendant to the military leader Oda Nobunaga (1534–82), who initiated the process of unifying the Japanese provincial clans. Mori died aged 16 or 17 defending his leader during the Honnō-ji Incident of 21 June 1582 in Kyoto, and Nobunaga himself also died during the coup. The crane motif on Mori’s garment reminds viewers of his unconditional fidelity. He is remembered in the role of Hori in kabuki plays, and more recently in historical film dramas and as a character in Gamecity’s Sengoku Musou 3: Empires (2011). The subject of this print was formerly believed to be theactor Ichikawa Saruzō, as in the example at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, or Ebizö V, as at the British Museum. The actor Ichikawa Saruzō I did exist, the third in a line of four actors bearing the name, and actually the fourth son of Ebizö V. He is, however, recorded as performing the role of Minamoto no Yoshitsune in the dance-drama Kanjinchō, together with Ebizö V (as Benkei), at the Kawarazaki theatre during the ninth month of 1852. He is unlikely to be celebrated performing a different role in a different playat the same time. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, suggests the actor to be Ichikawa Enzō I, while Nojima Jusaburō’s biographical dictionary of kabuki, Kabuki jinmei jiten (1988), notes that it is Enzō I rather than Saruzō I. Compared with the simplicity and visual force of Kunisada’s earlier Sukeroku portrait (Te Papa 2016-0008-31), this is a densely packed design. Its information overload, fine linear detail, and celebrations of rich colour and decorative brocades are the features that invited Kunisada’s critical dismissal in early 20-century appraisals. A.D. Ficke wrote witheringly: ‘all that meaningless complexity of design, coarseness of colour, and carelessness of printing which we associate with the final ruin of the art of colour prints finds full expression in him’. Today we are far more generous in our appraisal.
Sources:
David Bell, 'Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 30 (2019), pp. 56-81.
A.D. Ficke, Chats on Japanese prints (Rutland, VT and Tokyo, 1915).
Frank Whitford, Japanese Prints and Western Painters (London, 1977).
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2019