歌川国貞 • 美人東海道 • 岡崎之景 • 日本木版画 - 日本 - 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)
Mitsuke no Zu (見附ノ圖) — View of Mitsuke
From Tōkaidō Gojūsan Tsugi no Uchi (東海道五十三次之内) — Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, the "Bijin Tōkaidō"

Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome (nishiki-e)
Date: ca. 1838 (Tenpō 9)
Publisher: Sanoya Kihei (佐野屋喜兵衛 / Kikakudō)
Station: Sakanoshita (坂下) — Station 48 of the Tōkaidō, present-day Mie Prefecture
Format: Chūban tate-e, approx. 25.7 × 18.5 cm (10.1 × 7.3 inches)
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Condition

Impression & Colours: A fresh impression in which the Edo palette survives unusually well.

Paper: Very good. The washi is firm and supple, exceptionally well preserved for a print approaching 190 years of age.
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Mitsuke — The Tenryū River and the Beauty on the Cloud

A fashionable young woman fills the foreground, lifted clear of the landscape on the soft cloud of tinted paper that is this series' signature device — here a band of pale mauve. She wears a sumptuous robe of deep indigo strewn with floral roundels and blossom medallions, its scarlet linings and hems flashing at the sleeve-ends and trailing skirt, a soft yellow sash at the waist; a folded blue fan is held to her breast, and her gaze lifts outward, lips just parted. Poised over her brow is a striking red lacquered box-form — an attribute that, in the manner of the series, almost certainly carries a playful link to the station (see notes). Kunisada gives her the arrested, faintly theatrical poise of a stage figure rather than a traveller.

Behind her, the station declares itself unmistakably. Kunisada quotes Hiroshige's celebrated Hōeidō treatment of Mitsuke — the Tenryūgawa zu, "View of the Tenryū River" — with its flat-bottomed ferry boats poled across the shallows, travellers in conical straw hats clustered on the pale sandbank with a packhorse and a covered palanquin, and the far bank dissolved in morning mist beneath a graded blue sky. Mitsuke takes its name from the idea of "catching sight" — it was the first station from which travellers coming up from Kyoto caught sight of Mount Fuji — and the post was famous besides for its eels, catfish and snapping turtles of the Tenryū.

As throughout the series, the woman is never explicitly captioned to the place, and half the pleasure is reading the connection. Beauty and station face the same world; the viewer supplies the link.

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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.