Toyokuni III | View of doll market for girls’ festival, at Jikkendana
三代目歌川豐国 Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786–1865)
十軒店雛市之光景
View of doll market for girls’ festival, at Jikkendana
1848
木版画 | 三联续绘-纵绘大判 | 36cm x 25cm x 3
Woodblock-print | Triptych Oban tate-e triptych | 36cm x 25cm x 3
早期版次;颜色鲜艳;整体品相非常好;边缘经轻微修剪
Early impression with great color; slight trimmed, otherwise in good condition
$2,000
十轩店,旧江户城地名,原位于今东京都中央区日本桥室町。自江户时代中期起,此地便开设有多家人形店,每当一年一度的三月三的雏祭女儿节即将来临,店家们就会把自家最精致华丽的雏人形放置在货架上,以此招徕前来参加雏市的顾客。
许是大清早,人形店的门帘还未挑起迎客,三位衣着华丽、妆容精致的女子便带着一位可爱的女孩来到雏市选购雏人形。光是从她们脸上洋溢的笑容和迫不及待的模样,就足以看出对这次雏祭的重视程度。从画面最左侧露出的雏人形旁写有“玉山”字样标签来看,这几件作品应该都是出自幕末三大人形细工师之一的川端玉山之手,价格想必也是不菲。也不知道最后,她们会将哪几件雏人形带回家呢?
Interested in purchasing?
Please contact us.
三代目歌川豐国 Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786–1865)
十軒店雛市之光景
View of doll market for girls’ festival, at Jikkendana
1848
木版画 | 三联续绘-纵绘大判 | 36cm x 25cm x 3
Woodblock-print | Triptych Oban tate-e triptych | 36cm x 25cm x 3
早期版次;颜色鲜艳;整体品相非常好;边缘经轻微修剪
Early impression with great color; slight trimmed, otherwise in good condition
$2,000
十轩店,旧江户城地名,原位于今东京都中央区日本桥室町。自江户时代中期起,此地便开设有多家人形店,每当一年一度的三月三的雏祭女儿节即将来临,店家们就会把自家最精致华丽的雏人形放置在货架上,以此招徕前来参加雏市的顾客。
许是大清早,人形店的门帘还未挑起迎客,三位衣着华丽、妆容精致的女子便带着一位可爱的女孩来到雏市选购雏人形。光是从她们脸上洋溢的笑容和迫不及待的模样,就足以看出对这次雏祭的重视程度。从画面最左侧露出的雏人形旁写有“玉山”字样标签来看,这几件作品应该都是出自幕末三大人形细工师之一的川端玉山之手,价格想必也是不菲。也不知道最后,她们会将哪几件雏人形带回家呢?
Interested in purchasing?
Please contact us.
三代目歌川豐国 Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786–1865)
十軒店雛市之光景
View of doll market for girls’ festival, at Jikkendana
1848
木版画 | 三联续绘-纵绘大判 | 36cm x 25cm x 3
Woodblock-print | Triptych Oban tate-e triptych | 36cm x 25cm x 3
早期版次;颜色鲜艳;整体品相非常好;边缘经轻微修剪
Early impression with great color; slight trimmed, otherwise in good condition
$2,000
十轩店,旧江户城地名,原位于今东京都中央区日本桥室町。自江户时代中期起,此地便开设有多家人形店,每当一年一度的三月三的雏祭女儿节即将来临,店家们就会把自家最精致华丽的雏人形放置在货架上,以此招徕前来参加雏市的顾客。
许是大清早,人形店的门帘还未挑起迎客,三位衣着华丽、妆容精致的女子便带着一位可爱的女孩来到雏市选购雏人形。光是从她们脸上洋溢的笑容和迫不及待的模样,就足以看出对这次雏祭的重视程度。从画面最左侧露出的雏人形旁写有“玉山”字样标签来看,这几件作品应该都是出自幕末三大人形细工师之一的川端玉山之手,价格想必也是不菲。也不知道最后,她们会将哪几件雏人形带回家呢?
Interested in purchasing?
Please contact us.
Utagawa Toyokuni III (1786–1865)
In the pantheon of Japanese woodblock prints, some names loom large and legendary – Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, to name a few. Each in his own way revolutionized his genre. But for sheer productivity and quality and longevity, no one rivals the great Utagawa Kunisada. He was without a doubt the most prolific Ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, and the quality of his work was remarkably high throughout his lifetime.
His life caught the tail end of the early golden age of Ukiyo-e and ended during the final, halcyon days of Japanese woodblock printmaking. His legacy lived on with many famous pupils. In between, he produced countless designs of bijin (beautiful women), warriors, legends, Surimono, more bijin, the Tale of Genji, actors, landscapes, Shunga, fan prints and even more bijin. He led the Utagawa School, home to Hiroshige among others, for nearly 40 years.
His work embraced a subtle elegance and simplicity, a timelessness, when other woodblock artists often favored busy energy. Except when it didn’t. (Read on.)
He was born in 1796 and always had a steady income from his family’s ferry business – making him unusual in the world of Ukiyo-e, where so many struggled to make ends meet. He became a student of Toyokuni when he was 15. The master gave him the name Kunisada, using the tradition of a teacher starting a student’s name with the end of his own.
After getting his start doing book designs, Kunisada saw his first major successes in the 1820s. His initial specialties were bijin and warriors, as well as erotic books. He often put his subjects in well-drawn landscapes but rarely produced pure landscapes themselves.
One example of this occurred in the early 1830s when, reacting to the runaway success of Hiroshige’s Great Tokaido series, he began his own series that copied Hiroshige’s designs but placed a beautiful woman in the foreground. While Hiroshige’s prints were oban yoko-e (horizontal oban prints), Kunisada’s “copies” were smaller chuban-size prints, meaning two could be cut from a single oban-sized sheet. These little prints were phenomenally successful – as successful at least as Hiroshige’s – and eventually Kunisada was publishing his little Tokaido prints ahead of Hiroshige’s, and thus designing his own background landscapes.
Kunisada would later produce the “two-brush” Tokaido series with Hiroshige in the 1850s, in which he drew figures in the foreground while Hiroshige supplied beautiful little landscapes behind them. This was one of several notable woodblock print collaborations during his lifetime.
By then, Kunisada had taken the name Toyokuni III, to honor his master. (Toyokuni II had already been taken by Toyoshige, though Kunisada didn’t acknowledge the legitimacy. But that’s another story for another day.)
He kept going and going. In fact, in his long life, 1852 was his most productive year. His design skills were later matched by new technologies in woodblock prints, and some of his final series feature spectacular and intricate production, such as “Lasting Impressions of a Later Genji Collection” in 1859-61 and “A Contest of Magic Scenes by Toyokuni” in 1861-4. Okay – this series was not subtle: It featured over-the-top designs of Kabuki actors with fabled and ghostly beasts. Double-printing, mica, burnishing, raised printing, heavy paper, complex bokashi – no expense was spared for these deluxe editions.
Kunisada was generous with his students, many of whom went on to great success, including Kunichika, Kunisada II, Sadahide, and Kunihisa II. This last pupil, who among other projects designed the in-set landscapes in Kunisada’s wonderful “100 Famous Sights in Edo Matched with Beautiful Women” in 1857-1858, was a rarity among Ukiyo-e artists – a woman.
Kunisada died in 1865, just three years before the end of the Tokugawa epoch, leaving behind a body of work unmatched in his time.
Don’t believe me? Checkout The Kunisada Project. It’s all there. Just make sure you have some time.
Citation: Research for this brief biography included “Japanese Woodblock Prints” by Andreas Marks (Tuttle; 2010), among other sources.