Utagawa Fusatane

Utagawa Fusatane (歌川房種, active c. 1854–1889), who also signed his work as Ōsai and whose personal name is recorded as Murai Seima, was a late-Utagawa school designer whose career spanned the dramatic transition from the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate through the first decades of Meiji Japan. He was a pupil of Utagawa Sadafusa — himself a student of the Kunisada line — and although his figure prints clearly absorbed the manner of Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞, 1786–1865), the dominant Utagawa designer of the mid-nineteenth century, he was not Kunisada's direct pupil. His birth and death dates remain unrecovered, and sources give varying spans for his activity: the earliest dates cited for his work fall around 1849, and surviving Meiji-period prints carry dates into the 1880s. He has never been the subject of a monographic study.

Fusatane's output crosses nearly all of the standard ukiyo-e genres of the Bakumatsu and early Meiji decades. He produced landscape prints (fūkeiga) closely following the tradition of Hiroshige, pictures of beautiful women (bijin-ga), and pictures of manners and customs (fūzokuga), the last increasingly turning toward kaika-e — "civilization and enlightenment pictures" that documented the rapid Westernization of Japanese life after the treaty ports opened (Yokohama opened to foreign trade in 1859). He also designed Genji parody pictures, drawing on the perennial popularity of the Tale of Genji in Utagawa-school printmaking.

In the early Meiji years Fusatane produced a substantial body of news prints (shinbun nishiki-e) and didactic designs for a public adjusting to a new political and economic order. Among these are journalistic prints reporting current events — including a Kagoshima-newspaper print depicting the Battle at Saigō's camp during the Satsuma Rebellion — and instructional prints on sericulture (silkworm cultivation), an industry the Meiji state actively promoted as a foreign-exchange earner. Across his career he also produced historical subjects, warrior prints, and multi-sheet compositions drawn from legend and the stage.

Like most second-tier Utagawa designers of his generation, Fusatane worked extensively with the new aniline pigments imported from Germany beginning in the 1860s — the strong reds, magentas, and purples that distinguish Meiji nishiki-e from the more restrained vegetable-pigment palette of the late Edo period. His landscapes follow the Hiroshige tradition in their broad horizontal arrangements and attention to weather and season, while his figure prints adhere to the Kunisada studio manner with its taut linework and decorative kimono patterns. He is among the representative sources for the journalistic ukiyo-e of the transitional decades from about 1860 to 1890 — a generation of Utagawa designers who carried the print industry through the collapse of the old Tokugawa order and into the early Meiji marketplace, before photography and lithography began to displace woodblock prints as the principal medium for mass-circulation imagery.

Fusatane's prints survive in major public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, along with other Western and Japanese institutions that hold nineteenth-century ukiyo-e. For historians of Bakumatsu and early Meiji visual culture he is a representative figure of the late-Utagawa workshop tradition — neither a major innovator nor a marginal hack — whose surviving output offers a useful cross-section of the genres and pigment innovations that characterized Japanese woodblock printmaking in its final commercial phase before the rise of shin-hanga and the photographic press at the turn of the twentieth century.