Utagawa Kuniteru II

Utagawa Kuniteru II (二代歌川国輝, 1830–1874) — who also signed with the go (art names) Ichiyōsai (一曜斎) and, as Kunitsuna II (国綱), Ichiransai Kunitsuna — was a Bakumatsu and early-Meiji print designer whose work documents the visual transformation of Edo into Tokyo during the most turbulent decades of nineteenth-century Japan. Born Yamada Kunijirō in Edo, he was a pupil of Utagawa Kunisada I (Toyokuni III, 1786–1865), the most prolific actor-print designer of the mid-nineteenth century, whose Edo studio trained dozens of secondary pupils who carried the Utagawa school's compositional formulas into the Meiji print industry.

The name "Kuniteru" was used by more than one artist in the Utagawa school, and modern cataloguing distinguishes this designer — a Kunisada pupil whose career ran from the late 1850s into the early Meiji period — from the earlier Utagawa Kuniteru active in the first half of the century. Because he also signed as Kunitsuna II, museums and dealers commonly catalogue him under the dual designation "Kuniteru II (Kunitsuna II)."

Kuniteru II's career falls into two phases. The earlier, in the late Edo period, encompasses conventional ukiyo-e genres — actor portraits (yakusha-e), warrior subjects (musha-e), images of beautiful women (bijin-ga), and sumo prints (sumō-e) — in the Kunisada-school idiom. The second and far more historically significant phase, from around 1869 to his death in 1874, turned almost completely to the Yokohama-e and kaika-e (enlightenment prints) that recorded the visual novelty of the Meiji modernization program. Steam trains, gas lamps, brick-and-stone Western-style buildings, foreign warships, telegraph wires, and the new uniformed army and police all entered his compositions, frequently rendered in the brilliant aniline reds and purples that characterize early-Meiji color printing.

These Meiji prints, which constitute the bulk of his surviving output, document the rapid transformation of Edo into Tokyo following the 1868 imperial restoration. His Illustration of a Steam Locomotive Passing Shiodome in Tokyo, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, records the new Tokyo–Yokohama railway — the Shinbashi-to-Yokohama line that opened on 14 October 1872 as the first stretch of Japanese steam rail and became a defining image of Meiji modernization. Related railway compositions, such as his view of the Takanawa steam railway and his 1873 print of the five-story Western-style bank at Kaiunbashi in Kabutochō (the First National Bank, associated with the Mitsui house), register the new infrastructure of brick buildings, raised viaducts, gas lamps, and horse-drawn carriages that reshaped the city's eastern districts in the early 1870s. He also depicted the era's new industry, as in his print of the Tomioka silk mill.

Kuniteru II likewise carried the Utagawa school's long engagement with sumo prints into the Meiji period, and his subjects ranged more broadly across classical-narrative and current-events imagery. Much of his Meiji output was issued by the Tokyo publisher Yamamotoya Heikichi (Eikyūdō), one of the principal print houses specializing in current-events imagery and kaika-e for an audience eager to see the new buildings and machines of imperial Tokyo.

Kuniteru II died in 1874, only a few years into the Meiji period, at about the age of forty-four. His comparatively short Meiji career nonetheless produced some of the most documentary depictions of the early-Meiji transformation that survive from the print industry. He worked alongside contemporaries such as Utagawa Yoshitora, Utagawa Hiroshige III, Utagawa Kunisada III, and Yōshū Chikanobu, all of whom contributed to the Yokohama-e and kaika-e visual record of Japan's encounter with Western modernity. For collectors of Meiji visual culture, Kuniteru II remains a foundational designer whose surviving impressions record, with the immediacy of contemporary witness, the specific visual novelty that defined the first decade of the Meiji era.