** Like in film, music, and every art form, even ukiyo-e suffers the same fate — brilliant work gets buried when giants are casting long shadows. Kunisada's Tōkaidō bijin series was published right when Hiroshige's Hōeidō Tōkaidō and Hokusai's Fuji prints were redefining what landscape could be, and it has been quietly overlooked ever since. Look at what he's doing: every scene quotes a Hiroshige composition — here, the famous lone pine and horse market of Chiryū station — and then plants a bijin right in the foreground, turning a travel landscape into a fashion portrait without losing the place. It's Hiroshige's stage, Kunisada's star. And the chūban format only sharpens it. The colours are pure Edo flowerbed — peony pinks, deep kimono greens, that soft pink bokashi sky — and the paper has aged into a warm, honeyed tone that makes the whole sheet glow. Vivid where it needs to be vivid, quiet where it needs to breathe. ** ------------------------------------------------------------ Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞 / 三代豊国) Chiryū, Koma no Zu (池鯉鮒 駒ノ図) — Chiryū, View of the Horses 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) Series: Tōkaidō Gojūsan Tsugi no Uchi (東海道五十三次之内) — Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road, commonly known as the "Bijin Tōkaidō" Station: Chiryū (池鯉鮒) — Station 39 of the Tōkaidō, present-day Chiryū City in Aichi Prefecture Format: Chūban tate-e, approx. 25.7 × 18.5 cm (10.1 × 7.3 inches) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Condition Impression & Colours: Excellent. A fresh, well-printed impression with crisp keyblock lines preserved throughout — the fine details of the bijin's hair ornaments, the patterning of her green and pink floral kimono, and the dozens of small horses milling in the background are all sharply legible. The colour palette is vibrant and entirely unfaded, with the rich emerald greens of the pasture, the deep rose pink of the sunset band along the upper edge, the soft lavender and salmon of the foreground ground, and the deep indigo blues of her sash and the woven basket on her back all retaining their original Edo-period intensity. The bokashi gradations in the sky and ground are beautifully and evenly applied. Paper: Very good. The washi is firm and supple, exceptionally well preserved for a print approaching 190 years of age. Some minor and even soiling consistent with age. ------------------------------------------------------- Chiryū, View of the Horses — A Beauty Steps Out of the Famous Horse Fair A young woman strides forward along a sandy path, a tall woven basket strapped to her back and a long rake balanced over her shoulder. She wears a kimono of brilliant green strewn with vivid pink peonies, an indigo and salmon obi knotted at her front, and pale blue leggings above her straw sandals — a strikingly fashionable outfit for a working woman of the road. Her glance is sidelong and slightly self-aware, as if she has just felt a stranger's eye on her. Behind her, an extraordinary panorama unfolds: dozens of horses graze, kick, and rear across a wide green pasture under the watchful eye of mounted attendants and traders; a great pine and a crooked willow rise against the horizon; in the far distance, the crowds of the horse fair gather around the bamboo enclosures, with the blue line of the sea suggested at the upper left. This is Chiryū, the thirty-ninth station of the Tōkaidō and one of its most distinctive subjects. Located in present-day Aichi Prefecture, Chiryū-juku was famed throughout the Edo period for two things: the Chiryū Daimyōjin shrine, and the great horse market held in the meadows just outside the town every year in late April and early May. The horse breeders of Chiryū produced animals considered among the finest in Japan, and the early-summer fair drew samurai, merchants, and travellers from across the country — a riot of colour, dust, and noise, framed by the long avenues of pine trees that Tokugawa Ieyasu had ordered planted along the Tōkaidō to shelter travellers from the sun. The background here is borrowed, with affection rather than imitation, from Hiroshige's celebrated Hōeidō Tōkaidō print of Chiryū (Shuka uma ichi, "Early Summer Horse Fair") of c. 1833–34. But Kunisada has done something altogether more clever: he has lifted his bijin out of the landscape and brought her forward into our space, separated from Hiroshige's scene by a soft cloud of pale sand. She is not in the picture so much as walking out of it, towards us — a beautiful woman crossing from the world of landscape into the world of bijin-ga before our eyes. ---------------------------------------------------------- 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.