Utagawa Kuniaki II

Utagawa Kuniaki II (二代歌川国明, 1835–1888) was a late-Edo and early-Meiji designer in the Utagawa school, active in Tokyo across the political and visual transformations of the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. He trained under Utagawa Kunisada I (1786–1865), one of the most prolific and commercially dominant designers of the nineteenth-century woodblock industry, and emerged in the early 1860s as a producer of yakusha-e (actor prints), sumō-e, and bijin-ga in the late-Edo Utagawa idiom. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868 he adapted his output to the new market for kaika-e ("enlightenment pictures") and imperial subjects, becoming one of the school's reliable second-rank chroniclers of Meiji modernization. His prints are held today at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (which preserves the largest single concentration of his work, with more than forty sheets), the Honolulu Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Ronin Gallery archives.

He is distinct from the earlier Utagawa Kuniaki (歌川国明), an obscure Bakumatsu-era designer of the 1840s and 1850s whose dates remain unestablished; the suffix "II" (二代, ni-dai, "second generation") records the formal succession to the Kuniaki name within the Utagawa lineage. His personal name was Hachisuka — a name preserved in the FAMSF catalogue entry "Hachisuka Kuniaki II" for his Kegon Waterfall print — and Western sources also record the gō Kōsai (光斎) among his secondary signatures. The Utagawa school's habit of recycling names through generations of pupils generates the recurring ambiguity that surrounds his attribution; the "II" designation, the personal name Hachisuka, and the body of signed work dated from the early 1860s through the late 1880s together fix his identity as separate from his namesake.

His earliest dated prints — the 1860 portrait of the sumō wrestler Ōnaruto Nadaemon of Awa Province (MFA Boston), the 1861 Eastern Genji's Silkworm Cultivation (MFA), and the 1861 A Yoshiwara Clock series (MFA) — establish his position in the late-Bakumatsu market for portraits of sumō champions, courtesans of the Yoshiwara licensed quarter, and parodic Genji-mono designs. The Yoshiwara Clock series, in which each of the twelve traditional Japanese hours is matched to a different courtesan or scene from the licensed quarter, descends directly from Kunisada's celebrated 1850s bijin series and demonstrates his command of the late-Edo bijin-ga formula at the threshold of the Meiji transition. The 1862 productions — Actors Iwai Kumesaburō and Nakamura Shikan, the Storehouse of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon chūshingura) twelve-act actor series, and the Mukōjima cherry-viewing triptych — anchor his Bakumatsu reputation in actor-print conventions inherited from his teacher Kunisada and Kunisada's senior pupils.

The Chūshingura series of 1862 is one of his most ambitious surviving projects. The complete twelve-act sequence at the Museum of Fine Arts pictures the principal kabuki actors of the Edo stage — Bandō Hikosaburō V, Sawamura Tanosuke, Kataoka Nizaemon, Bandō Kamezō, and Ichikawa Sōjūrō — in their roles across all twelve acts of the classic vendetta drama, from the opening palace scenes through the climactic raid on Lord Kira's mansion. The format follows Kunisada's earlier multi-act Chūshingura sets in matching each act to a distinct sheet with paired actor portraits and inscribed cartouches; the survival of the complete twelve-act run in a single museum collection is unusual and gives the series exceptional documentary value for late-Bakumatsu kabuki performance history.