Utagawa Kunimaru

Utagawa Kunimaru (歌川国丸, 1793-1829) was an Edo ukiyo-e designer of the Utagawa school, a direct pupil of Utagawa Toyokuni I, and a productive contributor to the bijin-ga (beautiful-women pictures), yakusha-e (actor pictures), and surimono (privately commissioned prints) markets of the Bunka and Bunsei eras. His career, cut short by his death at age thirty-six, coincided with the most commercially intense period of Edo ukiyo-e publishing, and his surviving prints document the genre tastes of an Edo audience just before the disruptions of the Tenpo Reforms.

Kunimaru entered the studio of Toyokuni I in the first decade of the nineteenth century, joining a generation of pupils that included the future giants Utagawa Kunisada (later Toyokuni III), Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Utagawa Kuniyasu, and Utagawa Kunimasa II. Toyokuni's atelier was the dominant production-and-training operation of late-Edo ukiyo-e, and the Utagawa name granted to its pupils functioned as both an artistic genealogy and a market brand. Kunimaru signed his work with the standard Utagawa first character (国, kuni) inherited from his teacher, and occasionally used the alternative go Ichiensai. While Kunisada and Kuniyoshi went on to dominate Edo ukiyo-e through the long Bunsei and Tenpo decades, Kunimaru's early death in 1829 meant that his oeuvre belongs entirely to the slightly earlier Bunka-Bunsei moment, and his style retains more of the late-Toyokuni I idiom than the bolder manner his fellow students developed after Toyokuni's own death in 1825.

Kunimaru's bijin-ga are the largest single category of his surviving output. He drew on the classic late-Toyokuni I template for beauty pictures: elegant standing or seated women in elaborate kimono, often shown in domestic settings (reading letters, attending to a candle stand, viewing snow with a parasol and a small dog) or as identified Yoshiwara courtesans of named houses. His prints of Shiraito of the Tamaya, of beauties from the Ebi, Okamoto, and Tama houses, and of standing women with the inwardly turned gestures characteristic of late-Bunka feminine portraiture, place him squarely in the mainstream of the Utagawa beauty-picture tradition. He also designed views of famous Edo places (meisho-e), including the Naka-no-cho avenue in the New Yoshiwara, the Asakusa Kannon temple, the Shinmei shrine at Shiba, the Zojo-ji temple, and Toeizan, treating the city's pleasure-and-religious geography as the backdrop for the Bunka-era cult of beauty.

In yakusha-e Kunimaru worked in the Toyokuni I tradition of dignified bust-portraits and full-figure stage portraits, with the actor's identifying mon and role inscription anchoring each image to a specific performance. Surviving prints include his portraits of Bando Mitsugoro III in the role of a warrior doll for the fifth-month boy's festival series, the actor Iwai Shijaku as a geisha, and double portraits of Sawamura Sojuro IV and Segawa Roko IV. His actor prints are fewer than his bijin-ga but document the same Edo kabuki troupes that Toyokuni I, Kunisada, and the early Kuniyoshi were portraying in parallel.