Utagawa Kuniteru II

Utagawa Kuniteru II (二代歌川国輝, 1830-1874) — also known by the alternative go (art names) Ichiyōsai (一曜斎), Yamada Kuniteru, and, from approximately 1869, Utagawa Kunitsuna II — 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. He was a pupil of Utagawa Kunisada I (Toyokuni III, 1786-1865), the most prolific yakusha-e 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. Kuniteru II's birth name is variously recorded in dealer literature as Tanaka Kinjirō or Yamada Kuniteru, the latter giving rise to the alternative signature 'Yamada Kuniteru' that appears on a portion of his Meiji-era impressions.

The artistic name 'Kuniteru' had been used in the Utagawa school since the early nineteenth century by the senior pupil now known as Kuniteru I (歌川国輝, c.1808-1876), who himself studied under Toyokuni I. Modern scholarship has worked to distinguish the two Kuniterus — the first, an older Toyokuni I pupil whose dated work concentrates between the 1820s and the 1860s; the second, a younger Kunisada I pupil whose career began in the late 1850s and ran into the early Meiji period. The convention of identifying the younger artist as 'Kuniteru II' was settled in the twentieth-century catalogue tradition, and major institutions — the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria — now distinguish the two artists in their cataloguing systems. The MFA, for instance, captions Kuniteru II's prints with the dual designation 'Utagawa Kuniteru II (Kunitsuna II)' to acknowledge his later adoption of the Kunitsuna name following the death of his fellow Kunisada pupil Utagawa Kunitsuna I in 1868.

Kuniteru II's career falls into two distinct phases. The earlier phase, from approximately 1855 to 1868, encompasses his late-Edo work in conventional ukiyo-e genres — actor portraits (yakusha-e), warrior subjects (musha-e), and bird-and-flower prints (kachō-ga) — in the Kunisada-school idiom. The MFA Boston's 1858 Sparrow and Bulrushes kachō-ga and its 1868 triptych of Minamoto Yoritomo's conquest of Ōshū belong to this period, the latter dated to the year of the Meiji Restoration. The second and far more historically significant phase begins around 1869 and runs to his death in 1874, when Kuniteru II turned almost completely to the genre that would define his reputation: 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, French circuses, 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.