| Artist | Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川国芳, 1797/98–1861), signed Ichiyūsai Kuniyoshi ga (一勇齋國芳画) on each sheet with the red paulownia seal |
| Play | Higashiyama Sakura sōshi (東山桜荘子) — “The Higashiyama Storybook,” by Segawa Jokō III |
| Production | Nakamura-za, Edo — premiered eighth month of Kaei 4 (1851) |
| Actors |
Centre: Ichikawa Kodanji IV as Tōgo, headman of Asakura village (浅倉村庄屋当吾) Left: Ichikawa Ichizō III as Komasuke (駒助); Ichikawa Kodanji IV as Kyūzaemon (久左衛門); Ichikawa Kuzō II as Moriemon (森右衛門) Right: Sakata Sajūrō II as Iwakura Omomizu (岩倉主水); Arashi Jitōhachi III as Goheita (五平太); Ichikawa Hirogorō in an unidentified role |
| Publisher | Kakumoto-ya Kinjirō (角本屋金次郎) — the “Kado” 角 mark under a roof crest at the lower edge of each sheet |
| Seals | Two round nanushi censor seals, Kinugasa and Murata (1851), together with an oval shita-uri (下売) mark — see the note below on what that mark meant |
| Technique | Woodblock print (mokuhanga), polychrome nishiki-e — yakusha-e / kabuki scene |
| Format | Ōban tate-e triptych (大判三枚続), three separate sheets — each approx. 36.5 × 24.5 cm (14⅜ × 9⅝ in.) |
| Reference | Recorded among Kuniyoshi's 1851 designs for this play in the Kuniyoshi Project group Asakura ichidaiki (浅倉一代記, “The Life of Asakura”), with the same actor identifications and the Kakumoto-ya publication. The play designs are not listed in Robinson. |
Impression & Colour
Excellent. A strong, crisply registered impression across all three sheets, with the keyblock holding the fine work throughout — the individual straws of the mino raincoats, the woven basketry, the stencil patterning of the leggings and the tiny facial expressions in the crowd. The colour is vivid and unfaded.
Paper
Very good. Three separate sheets, each with the actor cartouches, signature, publisher's mark and seals present. Age-appropriate light toning to the paper; normal handling wear at the extreme edges.
⚠ Please examine all photographs carefully.
Kuniyoshi builds the whole triptych out of one opposition, and he does it in colour before he does it in narrative. The upper register is the mansion gate: lacquer red, black lacquer plates, rows of iron studs, hinge fittings the size of a man's torso — the flat, closed, expensive surface of authority. Below it, filling every remaining centimetre, is the village: straw raincoats, sedge hats, basketwork, indigo cotton, bare feet in straw sandals. Hands go up everywhere. Faces are shouting, alarmed, comic, frightened. A man has fallen and is being trodden past.
This is not the standard actor triptych of three stars posed against a plain ground. Kuniyoshi names his principals in cartouches — Tōgo in the centre in brown travelling cloak and blue, turning back with his mouth open; the sword-carrying retainers on the right; the villagers Komasuke, Kyūzaemon and Moriemon on the left — and then surrounds them with a mass of unnamed bodies deliberately allowed to run off all four edges. The composition has no still point. It is a director's solution to a scene about a crowd at a gate, and it is one of the things Kuniyoshi could do that his contemporaries in the actor-print trade largely could not.
The one figure holding the line is at the upper right of the third sheet: an older man in a white dappled kamishimo over teal, planted above the scrum, glaring down. Authority looking at the crowd from a step higher up — which is, in the end, exactly what the play is about.
By 1851 Kuniyoshi was in his fifties and the most inventive designer working in Edo — the man who had made his name on the Suikoden heroes, who had been in trouble with the authorities before over prints read as political satire, and who had a lifelong appetite for exactly this kind of material. He designed a considerable number of sheets around the Sakura production, several of which are now in museum collections; they were clearly in demand.
Ichikawa Kodanji IV (1812–1866) was the actor the production was built on. Small, unglamorous and a superb character player, he took Tōgo — a farmer in straw, then a ghost — and made it one of the defining roles of late Edo kabuki. The part carried him to the top of the profession and became the model for the peasant-martyr plays that followed.
Kuniyoshi triptychs reach the market regularly; complete ones in unfaded colour do not. Red and blue are the first pigments to go on prints of this date, and both are intact here across three sheets — the single most useful thing to check when comparing examples. Sheets from the Sakura production are held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and other institutions, and the group is catalogued on the Kuniyoshi Project.
For a collector, this is a print that carries a document as well as an image: a named premiere, a named theatre, a dated censor pairing, and the shita-uri mark of a subject the trade handled with care. Offers are welcome.
Shipping: Sent flat between acid-free tissue and rigid boards, in a reinforced carton, by tracked and insured post. Ships from Germany.
Guarantee: Three original Japanese woodblock prints of 1851, published by Kakumoto-ya Kinjirō. Guaranteed authentic and as described, with full refund if not.