KUNISADA • Early Kabuki Masterpiece • The Fisherman Namiroku • Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - Meiji period (1868-1912)

** This is a very rare design from Kunisada's celebrated late series Famous Actors Past and Present. We have been unable to locate any other impression of it on the international market **

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada / Toyokuni III (歌川国貞, 1786–1865)
Title: 漁師浪六 — The Fisherman Namiroku, played by Arashi Rikan III (嵐璃寛, haimyō Ganshi 巌獅, 1812–1863)
Series: Konjaku Kabuki Meiyū 今昔歌舞伎名優 (Famous Actors Past and Present)

Publisher: Ebisuya Shōshichi (恵比寿屋庄七), gō Kinshōdō 錦昇堂 — publisher's seal at lower left
Carver: Hori Ryūzō / Chōkō Ryūzan 彫工柳三 — carver's seal beside the title cartouche
Date: 1860; the standard edition of this design is recorded with a 3/1860 date seal
Technique: Nishiki-e woodblock print on paper, deluxe printing with bokashi and burnishing
Format: Ōban tate-e; approx. 36*24 cm
Reference: Laura Mueller, Competition and Collaboration: Japanese Prints of the Utagawa School, Hotei Publishing, 2007, no. 140 (standard edition of this design); Andreas Marks, Publishers of Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Compendium, 2011, p. 112 (publisher)
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Condition: Good colours and a strong impression. The paper shows notable trimming at the right margin, approximately 2cm, extending into the artist's seal; the main composition remains well preserved. There is some soiling and toning across the sheet. Good condition overall. The sheet is printed on a premium washi that responds well to cleaning if wished. Please check the images!
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About the print:

The actor here is Arashi Rikan III, one of the leading Osaka actors of the late Edo period. He began his career as an onnagata, playing opposite his teacher Rikan II, and was admired as a beautiful female-role specialist. From 1839 he also took on male roles, and he took the name Arashi Rikan III in 1843. His signature roles included Ono no Tōfū, the wrestler Nuregami Chōgorō, and the girl Omiwa. He was praised above all for his voice, and he worked in both Osaka and Edo until his death in 1863 at the age of fifty-two.

The role is Namiroku, a fisherman from Shiranui Monogatari. Kawatake Shinshichi II adapted the play from Ryūkatei Tanekazu's long-running illustrated novel about Princess Wakana, the daughter of the Kyūshū lord Ōtomo Sōrin. She avenges her family with spider sorcery against the Kikuchi clan. The play premiered at the Kawarasakiza in Edo in the second month of 1853, during one of Rikan's visits to the capital, and he took several parts in it. Namiroku is a fisherman who was once in service to the Toriyama house, and he is secretly the samurai Muraoka Shinpei. He gives shelter to the young woman Teruha, who is fleeing the Kikuchi. His jealous wife Koiso and his scheming father-in-law Hirekurō turn the household against him, and his attempt to escape with Teruha by sea ends in a desperate fight. The production was a major Edo success and was widely recorded by the Utagawa artists. Kunisada returned to the role here years later in the grandest format of his career.
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About the Setsugekka series:

Konjaku Kabuki Meiyū was conceived in Kunisada's mid-seventies as the culmination of a fifty-year career — a survey of the great kabuki actors of the past and of his own day, at a level of production quality no Edo publisher had attempted for actor prints in living memory. Ebisuya Shōshichi (Kinshōdō) issued the sheets between 1860 and roughly 1865, with the cost reportedly underwritten by the Mitani copper and iron merchant family, and engaged the finest available block-cutters — the carver Ryūzō's seal appears throughout the series — with lavish burnishing, gloss overprinting, embossing, and pigments chosen without regard to expense. John Fiorillo has drawn the comparison with the deluxe limited-edition chūban prints made in Osaka around the same period, the world of Hirosada; Osaka artists passed regularly through Kunisada's studio, and the debt in format and ambition is hard to miss.

The project was never finished. Of the 150 designs planned, 72 published sheets are known, 12 of them by Utagawa Yoshitora, who joined in 1862 — the usual explanation being that Kunisada, then in his late seventies, needed help or was already ill. He died in January 1865. Two proof prints and two preparatory drawings bring the total recorded compositions to 76. The series is generally regarded as the finest body of actor prints Kunisada produced, and its influence runs directly into Toyohara Kunichika's ōkubi-e of the following decades.