Hiroshige II • HANJI-E . 五枚組 完全セット . 本物の日本木版画 - Japan - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artists: Signed Ōju Ryūsai ga (応需立斎画) — catalogued as Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826–1869) — with a seal of Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904). A collaboration of the kind standard in 1860s actor prints, where figures and their pictorial settings were designed by different hands

Subject: Hanji-e (判じ絵, rebus puzzle-pictures) printed in blue above, with a row of kabuki actor portraits below

Format: Five ōban sheets (go-mai-tsuzuki) — each approx. 36 × 24 cm
Publisher: Gusokuya (具足屋), Edo
Note: Three sheets of this set have been catalogued by the Odalys gallery; a complete five-sheet set is rarely encountered intact
Date: Keiō 2 (1866), Tiger year — aratame date seal of the 12th month
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — nishiki-e
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Impression & Colours: Very good across all five sheets — strong, clean impressions with fresh, well-saturated colour, the deep blue of the rebus panels and the coral ground both vivid.

Paper: Good, offered honestly. Minor soiling and minor ink transfer. All five sheets are backed for stability. Each carries old insect damage (mushikui) at the upper right margin, confined to the rebus area and clear of the actor portraits: on four sheets this has been professionally repaired, while on the fifth small holes remain visible. The loss is minor — we are glad to have the remaining holes closed on request. Light, even toning consistent with age.
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The Puzzle — Reading the Pictures

Across the top of all five sheets, printed in cool blue, runs a parade of curious little images: cranes in flight, a wandering elephant, a pair of round spectacles, swords, a candle, a fox on the stairs, a bottle, a mortar. These are hanji-e — rebus pictures — and they are meant to be read rather than simply looked at. In a hanji-e, each picture stands for the sound of its name, and the sounds are strung together to spell a hidden word; here the puzzles encode words bound up with the kabuki actors ranged along the bottom of the set. Solving them was a parlour game for the Edo theatre fan, who would know at a glance which idol each cluster of pictures named.

The form had a sharper edge to it as well. Actor prints were a perennial target of Tokugawa censorship — at the height of the Tenpō reforms in the 1840s they were banned outright — and picture-puzzles offered a witty way to smuggle a forbidden name past the censor, naming an actor without writing his name. By 1866, when this set appeared, the restrictions had eased and actors could once again be openly identified; the hanji-e here is therefore less an act of evasion than a sophisticated game, a last flowering of a tradition that married the pleasures of the theatre to the pleasures of the riddle.

The Hands Behind the Set

The set is signed Ōju Ryūsai ga ("drawn by Ryūsai, by request") — the name Ryūsai having passed from the first Hiroshige to his successor, Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826–1869), the adopted pupil who carried the Hiroshige line into the Bakumatsu years. Alongside it appears a seal of Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), a leading pupil of Kuniyoshi and one of the foremost actor-print designers of the day, later a pioneer of the illustrated newspaper. The pairing reflects the standard division of labour in 1860s actor prints, in which a figure specialist and a designer of settings worked side by side on a single sheet.