歌川国貞 • 四季之爱颂 • 春画 • 日本木版画 - 日本 - Edo Period (1600-1868)

Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) — Toyokuni III
Shunka Shūtō Shiki no Nagame (春夏秋冬 色の詠) — In Praise of Love in the Four Seasons
Volume 3 (Autumn) — Deluxe Shunga Ehon, 1827–1829 (Bunsei Era)

Technique: Polychrome woodblock (nishiki-e) with metallic pigment embellishment and blind-printed embossing (karazuri)
Date: c. 1827–1829 (Bunsei Era)
Format: Woodblock-printed ehon (illustrated book), hanshibon format, fukurotoji (pouch binding), approx. 25.5 × 18 cm
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Impression & Colours: Very good. The impression is crisp and the colours retain excellent saturation throughout — the deep Prussian blue (berorin-ai), the vivid reds and rose pinks, the dense blacks of hair and lacquer, and the subtle bokashi gradations all remain strong. Metallic pigment accents and the delicate blind-printed embossing (karazuri) characteristic of this deluxe series are still evident across the spreads. The fine keyblock lines in textile patterns, hair, and tattoo work are preserved with remarkable clarity for a book nearly two hundred years old. The kanji in the picture-cartouches and text pages read clearly.

Paper: Fair to good overall for the age. The washi pages show toning and some soiling on the lower margins consistent with handling over nearly two centuries. There is minor wormhole damage (insect loss) in places, as is typical of ehon of this period; the wormholes are small and do not disturb the essential imagery. Some wear and creasing at the margins and corners.

Overall: Good condition for an ehon of this age and rarity. A complete, coherent volume with strong colour and impression — the principal virtues for any collector of shunga ehon

See British Museum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1981-0813-0-1-3?selectedImageId=1613484213
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Shiki no Nagame — The Book That Made Kunisada the Master of Shunga

Shunka Shūtō Shiki no Nagame — "In Praise of Love in the Four Seasons" — is one of the great shunga achievements of the nineteenth century and arguably the work that established Utagawa Kunisada as the pre-eminent designer of erotic books of his generation. Produced between 1827 and 1829 in four volumes corresponding to the seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter), it was an extravagantly produced first edition commissioned by a wealthy connoisseur for an elite circle of colleagues and friends — not a commercial release for the general market. Every element of its production was conceived for luxury: rich polychrome printing on premium washi, metallic pigment (mica, gold) dusted into robes and furnishings, blind-printed embossing (karazuri) raising textures from the paper, and an unusually wide palette including the then-new imported Prussian blue, which Kunisada deployed here at the very outset of its adoption in Japanese printmaking.

Kunisada signed these pages not with his own name but with the pseudonym Bukiyo Matahei (武喜夜又平) — a convention adopted by ukiyo-e artists to circumvent official prohibitions on shunga production. The deception fooled no one; connoisseurs recognised his hand instantly. Once the expensive first edition was exhausted, the blocks were reused for cheaper runs aimed at a wider audience, and those later editions proved so profitable that they cemented Kunisada's reputation as the master of erotica — a subject that would remain the most commercially popular in Japanese printmaking throughout the nineteenth century.

The book's structural conceit — love across the four seasons — allowed Kunisada to set his erotic vignettes in a rotating theatre of distinctly Japanese settings: a tattooed firefighter and his lover in a townhouse interior; a high-ranking courtesan with her patron amid brocade bedding embellished with gilded waves and shishi lions; lovers stealing away in a moonlit garden of pines and maple; a festival scene beside a lacquered matsuri cart; a nighttime triptych of interwoven bodies in an autumnal interior. This is shunga at its most inventive and least formulaic — image after image built around a sharply observed moment of Edo urban life.
--------------------------------------------------------

This Volume — Autumn Scenes from Edo's Floating World

Volume 3 carries the autumn section of the cycle, and Kunisada fills it with some of the most vividly observed tableaux of the whole series. The spreads include:

A tattooed tobi firefighter and his lover in a densely patterned interior — the man's torso covered in elaborate irezumi (oni mask, peonies, chrysanthemums, scrolling clouds) drawn in the Suikoden vocabulary that Kuniyoshi was popularising in exactly these years. On the back wall, two kabuki actor prints are tacked up — Kunisada's signature compositional trick of situating lovers in the real material world of the Edo commoner, where kabuki stars watched from every wall.

A high-ranking courtesan with her patron, drawing him close for a cup of sake amid bedding of extraordinary luxury — brocade cushions sprinkled with gold, a coverlet bordered with running shishi lions over stylised waves, her hair crowned with a full complement of golden kanzashi. A painted folding screen of autumn grasses behind; a used tissue (kami) at her feet leaves no ambiguity about what has just happened.

A nocturnal elopement — a cloaked samurai carries his lover across a pebbled garden path beneath a full moon, a pine branch and autumn maples above, a stone bridge and moonlit water behind. A discarded book and writing-slip on the ground suggest a love letter left in haste. The composition is pure theatre.

An interior scene of a man with a fan and his lover, the black cartouche reading Chiyoyorozu-something (千代萬) — possibly a place-name or identifying tag — a boldly rendered Shōki (the demon-queller) portrait hanging on the wall behind, a tray of autumn delicacies on a side table.

A nighttime triptych of three figures in an autumnal interior, the top band of the scene washed in deep grey-black to convey the late hour, bodies and textiles arranged in an almost painterly composition of interlocking forms.

A festival scene beside a lacquered matsuri cart, with its peony-decorated dancer's hat (hana-gasa), an elaborately painted wheel, and hanging banners in the background — an outdoor tryst wedged into the margins of a public celebration, couple beneath the cart.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Utagawa Kunisada — The Most Successful Ukiyo-e Artist of His Century

Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865) — who in 1844 assumed the name Toyokuni III — was in his own lifetime by far the most popular, prolific, and commercially successful designer of woodblock prints in nineteenth-century Japan. His reputation then exceeded that of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Kuniyoshi combined. Over a career spanning more than sixty years he produced something in the region of 20,000 designs across every genre: actor portraits (his primary métier), bijin-ga, Genji illustrations, warriors, sumo, landscapes, and — not least — a very substantial body of shunga, issued largely under pseudonyms to evade the censors.

His activity as an illustrator of erotic books remains comparatively understudied, but scholars increasingly recognise that his shunga ehon — and above all the deluxe first-edition sets of the 1820s–1830s like Shiki no Nagame, Enshi Gojūyo-jō, and Hana no Miyakoji — belong among the highest achievements of the entire genre. Kunisada's work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Princeton University, among many other major institutions worldwide.