Utagawa Kunimasa

Utagawa Kunimasa (歌川国政, 1773–1810) was a Japanese ukiyo-e designer of the late Edo period whose brief, concentrated career produced one of the most distinctive bodies of kabuki actor prints (yakusha-e) of the Kansei era (1789–1801). Born in 1773 in Aizu, in Iwashiro Province, he came to Edo as a young man and was first employed at a dye shop — a path into the print trade by way of textile pattern work that several ukiyo-e designers of his generation followed. There he attracted the attention of Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769–1825), then a rising star of the Utagawa school and only four years Kunimasa's senior, who took him on as a pupil. By tradition Kunimasa is counted as Toyokuni's first formal student, and the character 国 (kuni) in his name was conferred by his master. His first dated prints appear in late 1795, when he was already twenty-two, late for an ukiyo-e debut.

Kunimasa came to print design at a pivotal moment in the actor-print genre. Tōshūsai Sharaku had appeared and vanished in a ten-month span across 1794–95, leaving behind the most disorienting yakusha-e ever produced — large-head portraits (okubi-e) of Edo kabuki actors set against mica-dusted grounds for the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō. Toyokuni I was simultaneously redrawing the actor portrait in a more elegant register with his series Yakusha butai no sugata-e (Views of Actors on Stage). Into this moment Kunimasa pushed a third synthesis: an okubi-e that took Sharaku's psychological intensity and frame-filling cropping and married them to Toyokuni's cleaner draftsmanship and decorative pattern sense. His finest portraits of 1795–98 are among the most arresting actor images of the decade, and scholars place him just behind Toyokuni and Sharaku as the third indispensable designer of late-Kansei yakusha-e.

Kunimasa worked principally with Edo publishers active in the kabuki print trade, including Uemura Yohei, Yamaguchiya Tōbei, Yo-ya Eikichi, and Iwatoya Kisaburō. His standard format was the ōban single sheet; he signed simply Kunimasa ga (画), often with the publishers' marks and the kiwame censorship seal that became standard during the Kansei Reforms. His subjects were drawn directly from the kabuki stage of the moment: identifiable star actors of the Ichikawa, Iwai, Matsumoto, Nakamura, Sawamura and Kataoka lineages, shown in specific roles. Among the prints by which he is best remembered are the 1796 okubi-e of Ichikawa Ebizō (the retiring Danjūrō V) as Usui Arataro Sadamitsu in a Shibaraku scene — a profile-view large-head portrait designed as a tribute to the great actor's withdrawal from the Edo stage that autumn — and the closely related portraits of Kataoka Nizaemon VII and Sawamura Sōjūrō III from the same productions. His female-role specialists (onnagata) — Matsumoto Yonesaburō, Iwai Kumesaburō, Nakayama Tomisaburō — received some of his most refined treatments.

In 1799 Kunimasa collaborated with his master Toyokuni I and Kitagawa Utamaro on the printed book Yakusha gakuya tsū (Actors in Their Dressing Rooms), a thirty-six-portrait actor compendium with eighteen designs by each of Toyokuni and Kunimasa and a frontispiece by Utamaro. The book is the clearest documentary evidence of Kunimasa's standing within the late-1790s Edo print establishment. Individual leaves cut from the book circulate widely in museum collections today, including multiple impressions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.