Utagawa Fusatane

Utagawa Fusatane (歌川房種, active c. 1854-1889), who signed his work variously as Ichiyōsai Fusatane (一陽斎房種), Ōsai (応斎), and Fusatane, was a late-Utagawa school designer whose career spans the dramatic transition from the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate through the first decades of Meiji Japan. The standard biographical dictionaries — Roberts's Dictionary of Japanese Artists, Lane's Images from the Floating World, and the Japanese reference Nihon ukiyo-e jiten — record him as a pupil of Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞, 1786-1865), the most prolific and commercially dominant Utagawa designer of the mid-nineteenth century, though his birth and death dates remain unrecovered and he has never been the subject of a monographic study. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's authority record gives his active period as approximately 1849 to 1880, while the Art Institute of Chicago's catalogue dates his Eight Views of Lake Biwa series to 1854-1859 and surviving Meiji-period prints carry dates as late as 1889.

Fusatane's output crosses nearly all of the standard ukiyo-e genres of the Bakumatsu and early Meiji decades. His earliest documented designs, from the mid-1850s, include the untitled series of Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei) — the classical eight-view set of Lake Biwa scenes that every landscape designer in the Hiroshige tradition produced as a foundational exercise — and contributions to actor prints (yakusha-e) and beauties (bijin-ga) in the Kunisada studio manner. By the 1860s he was producing Yokohama-e (prints depicting the foreign settlement at Yokohama, which had opened to Western trade in 1859) and the broader category of yokohama-e and kaika-e ("civilization and enlightenment pictures") that documented the rapid Westernization of Japanese life. His Yokohama series were sold to a domestic Japanese audience hungry for visual information about the foreigners, ships, buildings, and customs now appearing in their treaty ports.

In the early Meiji years Fusatane produced a substantial body of news prints (shinbun nishiki-e) and educational designs documenting modern industries, foreign curiosities, and historical episodes for a public adjusting to the new political order. His Silkworm Cultivation (Kaiko yashinai gusa) of 1865 belongs to a Meiji-era genre of didactic prints showing the stages of sericulture, an industry the Meiji state was actively promoting as a foreign-exchange earner; his Empress and Court Ladies Enjoying the Autumn Foliage (Momiji goyūran no zu) of 1879 reflects the early Meiji vogue for prints showing the imperial family in cultivated leisure, a politically charged subject in the years immediately after the Meiji court's relocation from Kyoto to Tokyo and its emergence as the symbolic centre of the new state. Across his career Fusatane also produced large numbers of warrior prints (musha-e), historical illustrations, and triptychs depicting episodes from kabuki and historical legend.

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 landscape compositions follow the Hiroshige tradition closely, with broad horizontal arrangements and atmospheric attention to weather and season; his figure prints adhere to the Kunisada studio manner with its taut linework and decorative kimono patterns. He is among the principal sources for the journalistic ukiyo-e of the transitional decades 1860-1890 — 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.