Toyohara Kunichika

Toyohara Kunichika (豊原国周, 1835-1900) was the dominant designer of yakusha-e (actor prints) in the late Edo and Meiji periods and is generally regarded as the last major ukiyo-e master to make kabuki actor portraiture his life's work. Across a career of more than four decades he produced thousands of prints, working from the Bakumatsu world of Kunisada and Toyokuni III into the rapidly modernizing theatrical and publishing economy of late nineteenth-century Tokyo. His late series — above all the Hyakushu no uchi (One Hundred Roles of Baikō, 1893) and its companion sequences celebrating Ichikawa Danjurō IX — are widely held to mark the artistic close of the centuries-long ukiyo-e tradition.

Kunichika was born Yasohachi in the Kyōbashi district of Edo in 1835, the son of a public bathhouse owner; in his youth he took his mother's family name, Arakawa. He trained briefly under Toyohara Chikanobu, from whom he took the name Toyohara, and then entered the studio of Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), the leading actor-print designer of the day. As Kunisada's pupil he absorbed both the technical conventions of mid-nineteenth-century nishiki-e — the dense ōban triptychs of theatrical scenes, the close-up ōkubi-e bust portraits with strongly characterized faces, the standardized cartouches and signature blocks of the Utagawa school — and the working habits of a designer embedded in the Edo kabuki business, where prints functioned as advertising for current productions and as collectible portraits of the stars. Kunisada's death in 1865 opened the field for his pupils, and over the next decade Kunichika emerged as the leading specialist in actor prints in Tokyo, working closely with the great Bakumatsu and Meiji actors and with the publishers who shaped the late-century print market.

His most enduring relationship was with the kabuki actor Onoe Kikugorō V (1844-1903), whose poetry name Baikō (梅幸, "plum-fortune") gave its title to Kunichika's late masterpiece. Kunichika and Kikugorō V were friends as well as collaborators, and the actor's career across the second half of the nineteenth century is documented almost continuously in Kunichika's prints, from young onnagata roles in the 1860s through the major male leads of the Meiji period and into late-life signature parts. The Hyakushu no uchi series, commissioned by the publishers Fukuda Kumajirō and Gusokuya Kahei in 1893, sets Kikugorō V's full repertoire — kabuki classics from Kanjinchō, Yotsuya kaidan, Sukeroku, the Soga plays, the Chūshingura cycle, and a wide range of historical and contemporary roles — within a uniform vertical ōban format that fuses ōkubi-e portraiture below with a small inset above of a supporting actor. The series was printed on fine paper with extensive blind embossing, mica grounds, and metallic pigments, and is considered Kunichika's most fully realized project and one of the supreme yakusha-e productions of the entire ukiyo-e tradition. A parallel series devoted to Ichikawa Danjurō IX, the One Hundred Roles of Ichikawa Danjūrō (Ichikawa Danjūrō Engei Hyakuban), accompanies it.

Alongside these late series Kunichika maintained an enormous output of triptychs and single-sheet prints documenting kabuki performances, including memorial portraits (shini-e) of actors, scene-by-scene records of new plays at the Shintomi-za and the Kabuki-za, and series exploring the cross-pollination of kabuki and modern Tokyo life under headings such as Kaika ninjō kagami ("Mirror of Flowering Humanity," 1878), in which Meiji social types are presented through the visual conventions of theatrical portraiture. He also documented Meiji theater's modernization — gas and electric stage lighting, the construction of the Kabuki-za in 1889, the rise of female roles played by women in the new shinpa theater — and produced bijin-ga (beautiful women) and occasional historical prints. His memorial portrait of the actor Arashi Kichisaburō III (1864), now in the Art Institute of Chicago, is among his best-known shini-e.

Kunichika's eccentric personal life became part of his legend. He drank heavily and was famously restless: he claimed to have changed residences well over a hundred times — by one account as many as 107 — sometimes within a single year, abandoning rooms when the rent came due or simply when the mood took him. He married more than once, kept company with kabuki actors and theater publishers more than with other artists, and worked at extraordinary speed when commissions came in. Amy Reigle Newland's biographical study Time Present and Time Past (1999) reconstructed this figure for an English-speaking readership.

Kunichika died in Tokyo in July 1900, at the threshold of the twentieth century, just as ukiyo-e was being eclipsed in Japan by photography, lithography, and the new shin hanga movement. His prints are now held in major collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the British Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum, the National Diet Library, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Waseda University Theatre Museum. He is studied today as the central documentarian of late-Edo and Meiji kabuki theater and as the designer who carried the actor-print tradition of Kunisada and Toyokuni III into its final and arguably most concentrated flowering, before the medium and the actor culture it served gave way to twentieth-century Japan.