Kunisada • View of Fujikawa • Bijin Tōkaidō • Japanese Woodblock Print - Japan - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞 / 三代豊国, 1786–1865), signed Kōchōrō Kunisada ga (香蝶楼 国貞画)
Titel: View of Fujikawa (Fujikawa no zu)

Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e)
Date: ca. 1838 (Tenpō 9)
Publisher: Sanoya Kihei (佐野屋喜兵衛 / Kikakudō)
Format: Chūban tate-e, approx. 25.7 × 18.5 cm (10.1 × 7.3 inches)
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Condition

Impression & Colours: A well-preserved impression with good colour saturation throughout.

Paper: Very good. The washi is firm and supple, exceptionally well preserved for a print approaching 190 years of age. A small repair at the upper margin.
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The Series — Edo's Forgotten Masterpiece, in the Company of Mount Fuji and the Tōkaidō

There is a curious gap in the Western perception of ukiyo-e. Every collector knows Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–32) and Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833–34). They are, rightly, the twin pillars of the landscape print revolution that transformed the woodblock medium in the early 1830s. But ask the same collector to name the great third Tōkaidō series of the period — the one designed by the most commercially successful artist in all of Edo, Utagawa Kunisada himself — and they will almost certainly draw a blank.

That series is this one. Published by Sanoya Kihei around 1838, comprising 56 chūban-format designs, Kunisada's Tōkaidō Gojūsan Tsugi no Uchi (often called the "Bijin Tōkaidō" by modern scholars) is one of the most ingenious print projects of the late Edo period. Kunisada was, by his own admission, no landscape specialist — that was Hiroshige's territory, and Kunisada respected the boundary. So he did something altogether more interesting: he took Hiroshige's already-famous Tōkaidō landscapes and transplanted them into the background of each design, then placed a magnificent standing beauty in the foreground, separated from the landscape by a soft cloud of unmarked paper. The two artists were friends and frequent collaborators, and Kunisada's series should be understood not as plagiarism but as homage — a knowing, affectionate cross-promotion between the two reigning stars of ukiyo-e.

What makes the series so compelling is the visual riddle each print sets up. The woman in the foreground is never explicitly tied to the station behind her — there is no caption explaining her relationship to the place. But look closely and the connection emerges. At Yoshida, she leans on a balcony rail in the manner of the famously flirtatious meshimori-onna of that station; at Narumi, she wears a kimono dyed in the local Arimatsu shibori; at Chiryū, here, she carries a rake and basket — clearly a woman of the countryside, perhaps a peasant working the very pastures that supplied the horse fair behind her. Each print is a small puzzle, a fragment of a larger conversation between landscape and beauty, between Hiroshige's road and Kunisada's people.

And here is the genuine pleasure of these prints: they are intimate. Where Hiroshige and Hokusai painted Japan at the scale of mountains and post roads, Kunisada brings the scale right back down to a single fashionable young woman standing at the side of the road — caught mid-stride, mid-glance — with the whole of Edo Japan unfolding behind her shoulder. There is no other Tōkaidō series that does this.