Utagawa Hirokage

Utagawa Hirokage (歌川広景, also known by the art name Ichiyūsai 一勇斎), active in Edo (Tokyo) roughly from 1855 to 1865, was a late-Edo ukiyo-e print designer best known for a single sustained series: the Edo meisho dōke zukushi (江戸名所道化尽, 'Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo'), a set of vertical ōban prints published by Tsujiokaya Bunsuke between 1859 and 1861. He worked at the very end of the Tokugawa period, against the backdrop of the Bakumatsu years that culminated in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and his career is one of the more sharply concentrated bodies of work in late ukiyo-e: he is documented as a pupil of Utagawa Hiroshige I (1797-1858), but no firm dates of birth or death survive, and almost everything that is known about him is reconstructed from the prints themselves and from the publisher's records.

Hirokage entered the Utagawa school late, joining Hiroshige I in the final years of the older master's life. He carried the Hirokage signature (廣景) — combining the 'hiro' character of Hiroshige's name with 'kage' (景, 'view' or 'scene'), a meaningful choice for a designer whose principal subject was the landscape and city-view tradition that Hiroshige had brought to its highest point. His Ichiyūsai (一勇斎) art name links him to Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), whose pupils used the same gō, and some scholars have suggested that Hirokage moved between the Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi studios — a plausible reading given that the comic and theatrical spirit of his prints owes more to Kuniyoshi's strain of Utagawa-school humor than to Hiroshige's reserved landscapes. The publisher Tsujiokaya Bunsuke, who issued the Edo meisho dōke zukushi, had been one of Hiroshige's regular publishers and continued to commission landscape-format prints after his death, so Hirokage's career fits squarely within an established commercial niche aimed at Edo townsmen with an appetite for views of their own city.

The Edo meisho dōke zukushi is the work for which Hirokage is overwhelmingly remembered. The series gathers more than fifty vertical ōban sheets, each depicting a famous Edo location — Asakusa, Ryōgoku Bridge, Shinobazu Pond, Sujikai Gate, Mannen Bridge at Fukagawa, the Yoshiwara approaches, Dōkan Hill, and dozens more — but with the conventions of meisho-e ('famous-place pictures') systematically subverted by comic incident. Where Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei, 1856-58) had presented its sites as dignified, contemplative tableaux, Hirokage's prints stage the same locations as the settings for pratfalls, weather mishaps, public-toilet embarrassments, drunken outings, dog thefts, kappa pranks, and a generally Rabelaisian view of Edo daily life. The compositional vocabulary remains recognizably Hiroshige's: vertical ōban format, the same diagonal sweeps of bridge or hillside, the same use of weather effects (rain, wind, snow), the same conventional placement of famous-place legends in the cartouche at upper right. What is overlaid on this template is a sustained tradition of late-Edo comic theater and senryū-style humor — falling porters, runaway sedan chairs, gusts of wind toppling pedestrians from a bridge, a samurai using a public outhouse, a kappa (water-imp) attacking the thunder god — that brings the genre into the orbit of Kuniyoshi's gigaga humor pictures and the kibyōshi (comic picture-book) tradition.