Kunisada (Toyokuni III) | Girls in a Parody of the Battle of Dan-no-ura
三代目歌川豐国 Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) (1786–1865)
见立娘坛之浦
Girls in a Parody of the Battle of Dan-no-ura
1843
木版画 | 三联续绘-纵绘大判 | 37cm x 25.5cm x 3
Woodblock-print | Triptych Oban tate-e triptych | 37cm x 25.5cm x 3
边缘经修剪；几处修复
Trimmed; restored
$1,800
见立，日本特有的艺术手法，多见于江户至明治时代的浮世绘中，是浮世绘类型见立绘的得名原因。简言之，见立是一种包含着比喻、借代、用典、想象、重构的艺术创作手法。创作者可在表层的画面中，隐藏融合进深一层的主题、概念、传说与形象等，以此达到多重表现效果，使作品更富有内涵，并提升观赏的趣味性。坛之浦，位于今山口县下关市关门海峡，1185年3月24日，源家与平家在此地开战。由于平家军擅于海战，且装备灵活、潮流顺势，所以一开始便抢占先机，让源氏军吃尽苦头；正当苦战之时，源义经心生妙计，下令集中狙杀平家的水手及船夫。一时战局突变，源氏迅速占领上风。一番鏖战后，平家将领眼见大势已去，纷纷投海自尽，领袖平宗盛则被俘；年仅8岁，拥有着平家血脉的安德天皇则被外祖母二位尼挟抱跳海身亡。统治日本25年的平家政权，于此役后宣告灭亡。坛之浦外，海潮声声，船边的白灯笼随着海浪轻轻摇晃，三位女子言笑晏晏，度过着悠长闲适的夏日时光。右联与中联内的两位正在进行一场“极限拉扯”，一位举起清酒瓶，手夺衣摆，要再劝友续杯，一位抬右手婉拒，左手持酒杯朝身后躲去。左联中的女子则看上去较她们二位年长几岁，一副“大姐大”派头，口衔牙签，手削鲜果，饶有兴致地看着这场“斗智斗勇”。斗转星移，到了江户时代，坛之浦的腥风血雨早已退却，此时的它，倒是一处夏夜乘凉的好所在。
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Utagawa Kunisada (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.