Artist: Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞, 1786–1865), signing Toyokuni ga (豊国画) within a toshidama cartouche on each sheet — the mature signature of his years as Toyokuni III, head of the Utagawa school. Play: Soga moyō Kameyama-zome (蝶鵆亀山染) — "Soga Patterns Dyed at Kameyama," a Kameyama-vendetta drama staged at the Kawarazaki-za, Edo, in the 7th lunar month of Ansei 2. Roles: Akabori Mizuemon (赤堀水右衛門, right sheet), the villain of the piece, and Ishii Heisuke (石井兵助, left sheet), one of the Ishii avengers. The sheets name only the roles; the actors are identified by their nigao (facial likenesses) as Arashi Kichisaburō III as Mizuemon and Kataoka Gadō II as Heisuke — the same casting recorded for this production by the Ritsumeikan ARC / MFA Boston project. Date: Ansei 2 (1855). Censor marks: aratame seal + date seal "Hare 7" Format: Ōban diptych, tate-e — two sheets, each approx. 35 × 24 cm. Technique: Nishiki-e (full-colour woodblock) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Condition: A fair printed pair. The whole ground — sky bleeding down into churning river — is worked in bero-ai (Berlin/Prussian blue) with long bokashi gradation, the current drawn as a restless net of pale eddies against deep blue. Mizuemon's black crested haori and swept wig read as double-printed and burnished for that lacquer-deep saturation Kunisada reserved for his villains, set against the pale, drawn face of a man entirely in command of the scene. some overall soiling, marginal thinning/wear, and areas of set-off (ink transfer); small holes. Overall fair condition. Please check the images carefully! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- About the print Kunisada stages the confrontation as a mie — the frozen tableau at the pitch of a scene — and lets the river do the work of tension. Mizuemon lounges with insolent ease on a black wicker chest, one hand raising a slender kiseru pipe, the other already sliding his blade free; his tattooed leg is thrown out, his gaze contemptuous. Across the gutter, Heisuke has been driven to the ground among the river stones, sword still gripped but his body folded and off-balance, a second chest pushed aside behind him. The design reads left-to-right as defeat against dominance — the avenger low and straining, the villain high and unhurried — with the swirling water binding the two halves into a single charged image. It is Kunisada at his most theatrical, translating a stage climax into pure graphic force. The Kameyama vendetta The play belongs to the sekai ("world") of the Kameyama revenge, one of the great Edo vendetta cycles ranked beside the Soga brothers and the forty-seven rōnin. Its historical kernel is a 1701 incident in which Akabori Mizunosuke murdered Ishii Uemon, a retainer of Lord Inaba; Uemon's sons obtained official sanction and pursued their father's killer for some twenty-eight years, the stage version relocating the final reckoning to Kameyama Castle. To satisfy the censors, playwrights shifted names and places and grafted the plot onto the older Soga framework — a doubling the very title Soga moyō Kameyama-zome announces. Here Kunisada isolates the essential opposition of that long story: the untouchable villain and the avenger not yet risen.