Κουνισάδα - Οι ηθοποιοί στους 53 σταθμούς του Τόκαϊντό - Ιαπωνική ξυλογραφία - Ιαπωνία - Meiji period (1868-1912)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada 歌川国貞, signing as Toyokuni III
Series: Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi 東海道五十三次之内 ("Actors at the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō"), the famous 1852 "Yakusha Tōkaidō"
Station: Akasaka 赤坂

Technique: Nishiki-e (multi-colour woodblock print)
Format: Ōban tate-e, single sheet, approx. 36 × 24.5 cm
Date: 1852 (Kaei 5)
Genre: Yakusha-e (kabuki actor portrait)

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Condition:

A very good impression with strong, well-registered colour. Minor trimming. A very light horizontal fold (consistent with former album mounting) that does not affect the composition. The paper supple. Overall very good condition. Please see the image closely.

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About the print:

Two heroes loom close against a softly graded sky, framed at upper right by a cluster of travel gear — woven baskets, a bundled pack, a wayfarer's tag — that playfully announces the Tōkaidō theme. In front kneels the great ninja Jiraiya, his identity spelled out in the sweeping blue characters across his robe: 児雷也, "the Gallant of Thunder." Jiraiya is one of the most beloved shape-shifting heroes of the Edo stage and page — a noble bandit schooled in toad magic, forever locked in combat with his serpent-wizard nemesis Orochimaru. Behind him rises a stern, sword-bearing samurai in a striking tortoiseshell-patterned cloak, glowering off to the side with the coiled tension Kunisada gave his finest villains and retainers.

The design belongs to Kunisada's landmark Actor's Tōkaidō of 1852, and it carries the charge of that exact theatrical moment: Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari ("The Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya") was one of the great hits of the Edo stage in 1852, and prints of its stars sold as fast as they could be cut. Kunisada, the most sought-after portraitist of his age, seizes the drama of the confrontation in half-length — a format that pushes the actors' faces and costumes to the very front of the picture plane, close enough to read every thread of the brocade.

About the series

Actors at the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road is one of the most successful print projects of the entire ukiyo-e era. It was born of necessity: the Tenpō-era reforms had banned the naming and glorification of kabuki actors, so Kunisada devised an ingenious workaround, pairing each idol — identifiable by role, costume and nigao likeness rather than by name — with one of the fifty-three post-stations of the great highway between Edo and Kyoto. Wildly popular, the series eventually grew far beyond its nominal fifty-three designs to more than 150 sheets, some stations appearing several times. It stands today as a roll-call of the theatrical superstars of 1852, and a high point of Kunisada's late portrait style.

There is a quiet poignancy in the sheet that its first buyers could not have felt. In 1852 Danjūrō VIII was the living god of the Edo stage, so idolised that when he bathed onstage in Sukeroku the water was sold off to his fans. Two years later, in the eighth month of 1854, he took his own life in Osaka at the age of thirty-two — and the city's grief spilled out in more than a hundred different memorial prints. This portrait belongs to the bright years just before that catastrophe: not a mourning image, but the star himself, alive and magnetic, exactly as his admirers wished to remember him.