KUNISADA • 源氏絵 • 火鉢（『The Brazier』） • 日本木版画 • 浮世絵 - Japan - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Artist: Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞, 1786–1865)
Title: Hibachi — "The Brazier"
Series: Fūryū haru no kyō (風流春乃興) — "Fashionable Pleasures of the New Year" / "Elegant Spring Entertainments"

Publisher: Izumiya Ichibei (和泉屋市兵衛), Kansendō
Date: c. 1847–48
Format: Vertical ōban triptych — three sheets, overall approx. 36 x 75cm
Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock), with gold, extensive textile patterning and bokashi shading
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Condition: Excellent colour and impression — strong, fresh and well-registered. There is one thin horizontal fold across each sheet, and a fold in the margin of the outer sheets (visible in the images); otherwise clean and very presentable.

These prints were professionally restored from an Edo-period album: the original album folds (one horizontal, one vertical) have been flattened and the sheets stabilised, so the paper is now firm and supple.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

About the print

A winter's-day interior in a grand Edo mansion, and one of the quietly perfect bijin-ga triptychs of Kunisada's mature years. At the centre a young woman carries a fine lacquered hibachi, its charcoal glowing red in the ash, and turns to look back over her shoulder as she crosses the room — the small pivot of the head that Kunisada used again and again to set a whole composition in motion. Her companion at the right gestures after her, sleeve raised to her chin, while at the left a senior attendant draws back the fusuma to let her through.

The setting is the real luxury here. Behind the figures runs a painted wall of yamabuki (kerria) tumbling in yellow drifts along a pale blue stream, banked with gilded, lattice-patterned clouds — a decorative scheme that any Edo viewer would have read as a Tamagawa conceit, the kerria-lined Ide no Tamagawa being the most familiar of the Six Jewel Rivers. Against it Kunisada stacks three complete costume statements: a muted plum-and-cream shibori robe, a red-and-white kimono strewn with floral roundels, and a deep indigo garment with bold white and blue chrysanthemums. The title cartouche is not floated over the picture but built into it, printed as a red paper slip pasted to the wood-grained sliding door at the right — a small piece of trompe-l'œil that is typical of the wit in this series.

The series belongs to the vogue for elegant, faintly Genji-flavoured interiors that dominated Kunisada's output for Izumiya Ichibei in the late 1840s: no narrative to follow, no actor to identify, simply a sequence of luxurious domestic moments observed with enormous textile sophistication. Complete triptychs from the group are considerably less common than stray single sheets — the V&A, for instance, holds only the right-hand panel of this design.