Who Was Japanese Artist Utagawa Kunisada?
Welcome Japanese woodblock print collectors and enthusiasts. Today we are going to talk about one of the true giants of the ukiyo-e world, the most prolific woodblock print artist, Utagawa Kunisada. As usual I’ll start with some background bio information and then we’ll look at selected prints from his body of work.
Kunisada was born in 1786 in Honjo near Edo. His father was a merchant and a poet, and owned a ferry. The family had enough money so he could take part in the arts and he studied painting. In the year 1800, at the age of fourteen, he became a student of Utagawa Toyokuni, the head of the famous Utagawa School and later took the artist's name Kunisada. By 1813 he was considered to be the top Ukiyo-e artist in Japan. Even more popular than Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.
One of the reasons for this popularity is that he was the most prolific print designer with over 20,000 designs in his 60 year career, that includes books, prints and paintings. So do the quick math and that’s 350 designs a year. In fact, in 1852 alone it was said he produced over 700 designs - now obviously one person can’t do that alone, but by that time he had a big studio with a lot of assistants. There were over 50 artists that worked at his studio. Many famous ones, among them: including Sadahide, Kunisada II, Yoshitoyo, Sadanobu, Kunichika, Chikanobu, and of course many, many others.
Side note: It’s not unusual for a popular artist to use assistants to co-produce artwork, this arrangement was also popular throughout Europe and America. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Rubens, Andy Warhol, and Jeff Koons, are some examples.
Ok, enough background, I’m going to take you through some of Kunisada’s print series, semi-chronologically. Starting with: His “Great Performances” series in 1815.
We're starting with actors because actor prints or Yakusha-e made up about 70% of all his prints. In this first print below, the actor is playing the role of the greengrocer's daughter Yaoya Oshichi, she was supposed to be a teenager, and not too smart - which I think you can see come across in this print. You can learn more about her true story and sad fate in my video on the Suzugamori execution grounds.
In this next print below, we see the dramatic mie pose of this actor as he transforms himself into the thunder god and flies to Kyoto to fight his enemy.
Note how distinctive the characters are in these early prints. I think he was influenced at that time by Toyokuni’s style, which you can see from the example below of an actor print in a fan by Toyokuni. But as we go through this blog, you’ll also see that Kunisada’s style changes quite a lot as time goes on.
Let’s jump a few years to 1818 and look at this early bijinga series.
Bijin-ga means beautiful women pictures. Kunisada was famous for his bijinga and they made up about 20% of his body of work.
The "Pride of Edo" is a beautiful set of ten prints comparing the famous places of Edo to the women of the area. Many of these prints show the stylistic influence of Utamaro. What is interesting here is that these women are not all fancy dolled up geishas, but working women going about their daily activities.
Now let’s skip to 1832. Kunisada did several series of actors portraits reflected in mirrors. See in his print below how he uses the ornate black frame of the mirror as the frame of the picture, there is colorful cloth wrapped around the edges as a decorative element and the Kanji or text description is outside the frame on the paper.
It’s a clever concept, but he wasn’t the first artist to do faces reflected in mirrors, here’s one below designed by Shuncho about 40 - 50 years earlier and a similar beautiful print by Utamaro.
But see how Kunisada’s version is much more stylized, The actor is not literally peering into the mirror - the mirror is a device to frame or reflect the portrait of the actor.
Kunisada designed very few landscape prints but in the late 1830s he published a Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido series. This series had a beautiful woman in the foreground with a stylized cloud element separating them from the landscapes in the background. Take a look at the background here in his print of Mishima, a village with travelers on a misty evening.
Now look at this print below by Hiroshige of Mishima, notice the similarities. Kunisada “borrowed” and adapted most of the landscape backgrounds from Hiroshige's popular Tôkaidô series.
The general thought here is that Kunisada and/or the publisher did this in order to help promote Hiroshige’s Tokaido series. At this time Hiroshige was an up and coming artist. So it was a win/win. Kunisada got his amazing Tokaido backgrounds and Hiroshige got the prestige of being associated with the top artist of the time. Hiroshige’s Tokaido series went on to be extremely popular and helped jumpstart his artistic career. It reminds me of many of today’s musical artists, that get parts of their tracks sampled by a more famous musical artist and that association helps boost their career.
When I get to the 1840’s I start to go crazy because there’s so many series I like. But I’ll start with a series I didn’t know even existed before doing the research for this article. "Shadow Pictures of an Auspicious Age" a half-length bijin series designed in 1844. This is a beauty reading by lantern light. I love the hard edges of the light and the dramatic shading.
Now we get to one of my favorite Kunisada series, “The 53 Parallels for the Tōkaido Road" A collaborative Tokaido series by Kunisada, Hiroshige, and Kuniyoshi, published around 1845 . The prints below are by Kunisada. I love this scene of the woman fishing, look at the details on her kimono and her focus on the wriggling crawfish.
This one is of a woman making shibori cloth which is a dying process where the cloth is wrapped around pebbles and it creates circular patterns. You’ll see this patterned cloth on many kimonos in Ukiyoe prints.
By 1852 when Kunisada was 67 years old, his studio was producing the most work ever. And he produced his most famous Tokaido and Actor series of 139 prints, called “53 Stations along the tokaido with parodies of actors”. In this series we see the Kabuki actor in the foreground, then there’s a cloud like element that separates the actor from the background, and in the background, we see scenes from the Tokaido stations.
Kunisada was the first artist to use the Tokaido theme as a backdrop for his actor portraits. If you notice the cartouche in the upper right also has objects that relate to that play or location. One interesting aspect of this series is that although the prints can quite easily stand by themselves, many of them can also be combined into diptychs or triptychs, because the backgrounds match and the actors have some relationship to each other.
One source I read said that some of the prints in this series were so popular, 7000 copies were made. So let’s go down the rabbit hole for a second. Let’s say that 7,000 first edition copies were made of a print back in 1852. And let’s estimate 50% of those were lost or destroyed in the past 170 years. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, then let’s guess 25% of the remaining ones are in very poor condition.
So that leaves us with 2,635 decent prints, let’s assume 1,000 of those are in museum, college, or gallery collections. So that leaves us with about 1635 decent prints floating around the world for collectors like us to potentially purchase. And the cost for one of these prints in very good condition, is often less than $500. That’s amazing to me. This esoteric woodblock print medium that requires such artistry in the design, carving and printing, plus here we have the most popular artist and his most popular series, in very finite numbers, for what I believe is a relatively low cost.
All those assumptions I just made underscores one of the issues in woodblock print collecting, we don’t really know how many prints were printed in the 1800’s. I’m sure at the time the publishers kept meticulous records but I’ve never seen any, and I don’t know if any survived. If you have some insights please send me a note.
Ok back to Kunisada with a series dear to my heart, "Famous Restaurants of the Eastern Capital". I love restaurant themed prints because they pair famous actors with popular restaurants of the day. In this case the bold actor portraits in the foreground were done by Kunisada and the restaurant scenes in the background insets were by Hiroshige. I guess that Once you have a winning formula you might as well go on repeating it.
In 1854 Kunisada teamed up with Hiroshige again to publish “The 53 Stations by Two Brushes" - two brushes meaning Kunisada and Hiroshige - and by now you know who did what. In this interesting print we see an androgynous looking youth being inspected by an old woman to make sure he wasn’t a she. This is because they had strict rules about ladies of the court sneaking out of the city.
From 1860 - 1865 Kunisada was in his 70’s but still managed to produce over 160 different series of prints. I’m going to quickly run through a handful of those so you can see the variety and artistry in them.
In 1863 we have the series "A Modern Comparison of 36 Flowers". I love the cartouche on this series with the big fat, juicy kanji. This series is notable because it included a portrait of Kunisada done by Kunichika.
In the year 1864. One of his last great series. "The 47 Ronin - Stories of the Faithful Samurai". Kunisada matched bold portraits of the samurai with Hiragana letters - you can see them in the yellow diamond shape.
This is a fun series called "A Contest of Magic Scenes". Where actors were shown in various mystical scenes, many from Kabuki plays. Below is one of the 36 prints from that series.
Then we have “The Flowers of Edo, A collection of Famous Places”, a collaborative series with 21 artists participating. Including Kyosai, Hiroshige II, Yoshitoshi, Sadahide, Yoshitora and others. Each of the panels were done by a different artist. One of the top panels displays a Title Section which has the name and Troop number of the local Fire Department in it, Then there are panels with Scenes from the District along with, of course, a kabuki actor.
I thought this next one was a nice actor series "A collection of popular birds in accordance with your wishes", from 1860.
And I’ll wrap up with "A Present Day Suikoden", showcasing well-known actors portraying dangerous outlaws and bandits.
Kunisada continuously developed and adapted his style to match the demands, tastes and trends of the time. He died at age 79 in 1865 in the same neighborhood in which he had been born. He was buried in the Komyoji temple but surprisingly, I found very little information about this online. For those of you wanting to learn more about Kunisada, I really recommend the book by Andreas Marks on Kunisada’s Tokaido.
I’ll leave you with A well-known anecdote that relates, that the young Kuniyoshi, was having trouble making a living as an artist and was thinking about giving up, then he saw Kunisada, enormously popular, dressed in rich clothes and enjoying himself with a beautiful geisha in Edo. This motivated Kuniyoshi and he vowed to renew his devotion to his art and later he became an extremely successful artist in his own right.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick overview of his work. If you want to watch the video of this article with more examples of Kunisada's work, click here. Happy collecting!