Utagawa Kuniteru

Utagawa Kuniteru I (歌川国輝, 1808-1876) was a Bakumatsu and early Meiji ukiyo-e print designer of the Utagawa school, a pupil of Utagawa Kunisada I (Toyokuni III, 1786-1865), and an active middle-rank member of the dominant Kunisada workshop in nineteenth-century Edo. Across a career that stretched from the 1820s into the 1870s he produced actor prints (yakusha-e), warrior and history prints (musha-e and rekishi-ga), sumo prints (sumō-e), and — most importantly — Yokohama-e and modernization prints depicting the new foreign presence at the treaty port of Yokohama and the technological transformations of early Meiji Tokyo. He is closely associated with two of the great visual subjects of his late career: the first steam railway between Shimbashi and Yokohama, opened in 1872, and the European circus troupes that performed in Tokyo from 1864 onwards. His name appears in collection records at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (particularly the William Sturgis Bigelow Collection), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and other major Western institutional holdings of Japanese prints.

Kuniteru's biography is complicated by a generational naming problem that has long confused both collectors and museum cataloguers. Two distinct artists used the name "Utagawa Kuniteru" in roughly overlapping periods: Kuniteru I (1808-1876), born Yamashiroya Jirobei and trained under Kunisada I, who used the gō Ichiyūsai (一勇斎) and earlier signed himself Sadashige (貞重), Gochōtei Sadashige, and Tōkaen; and Kuniteru II (sometimes recorded as Kunitsuna II, 1830-1874), a slightly later Utagawa designer also active in the Bakumatsu and early Meiji decades. Many works signed simply "Kuniteru" or "Kuniteru ga" cannot be assigned to one artist or the other on signature alone, and museum records frequently merge their dates into a single composite entry ("Utagawa Kuniteru, Japanese, 1830-1874" is common at the Met, for example, even on prints stylistically and chronologically consistent with Kuniteru I). The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is more rigorous: its catalogue records explicitly distinguish "Utagawa Kuniteru I (Sadashige)" (1808-1876) from Kuniteru II, anchoring Kuniteru I to the line of Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) and to the signature names Sadashige and Ichiyūsai. The MFA's stance is closer to current scholarly consensus, and the prints in its Bigelow collection (such as the Susanoo / Inada-hime print from Honchō eiyū den, dated 1847-52) are securely attributed to Kuniteru I.

Within the Utagawa lineage Kuniteru I belonged to the second generation of Kunisada's pupils. After his teacher took the name Toyokuni III in 1844, Kuniteru continued to produce actor prints in the standardized Kunisada/Toyokuni III idiom: ōban portraits of kabuki performers, half-length close-ups (ōkubi-e), multi-figure compositions for popular plays, and silhouette-style novelty images (kage-e). His Lives of Heroes of Our Country (Honchō eiyū den) series of 1847-52 places him in the warrior-print tradition that ran from Kunisada and Kuniyoshi through the late-Edo period, and his sumo prints participate in the parallel sumō-e genre that Kunisada had codified for the Utagawa school.