Utagawa Kunitsuna

Utagawa Kunitsuna (歌川国綱, 1805-1868), often referred to in modern scholarship as Kunitsuna I to distinguish him from a later artist who used the same name, was an Edo print designer of the late ukiyo-e period who worked across the full breadth of the nineteenth-century commercial print repertoire — actor portraits (yakusha-e), warrior prints (musha-e), kachō-ga (bird-and-flower prints), Edo and Tōkaidō views (meisho-e), and sumo prints (sumō-e). His personal name was Kawaguchi Toyoharu, and he is recorded as having studied under Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769-1825), the founder of the dominant Utagawa branch of yakusha-e design. Toyokuni I's studio in early-nineteenth-century Edo was the most productive single workshop in the history of Japanese popular printmaking, training the generation of Kunisada, Kuniyoshi, Kuniyasu, and dozens of secondary pupils — Kunitsuna among them — who together effectively defined the visual language of mid-century Edo ukiyo-e.

Kunitsuna's career thus places him in the second tier of Toyokuni I's pupils, working alongside the celebrated Kunisada (Toyokuni III) and Kuniyoshi but at a more modest scale of output and reputation. He used the alternative go (art names) Ichiyōsai (一陽斎) and Ipposai (一鵬斎) on his signed prints, the kind of stylized poetic studio names that Utagawa pupils adopted to mark their place within the school's ranked hierarchy of artistic personae. The British Museum, Waseda University Library, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and the Ritsumeikan Art Research Center hold prints by Kunitsuna I across multiple genres, providing a documentary record of his output during the Ansei (1854-1860), Man'en (1860-1861), Bunkyū (1861-1864), and Genji-Keiō eras (1864-1868) — the final decades of the Edo period that coincided with his most productive years.

The surviving corpus of dated impressions concentrates between roughly 1853 and 1864, with his Famous Places in Edo (Edo meisho) series dated to the ninth month of 1853 — coincidentally the year of Commodore Perry's arrival at Uraga, which would soon transform the Edo ukiyo-e industry. His Mount Kurama print of Sōjōbō, the king of the tengu, dates to 1859; his triptych of Minamoto no Yoshitsune and his nineteen retainers crossing in a boat dates to the same year; his Tōto meisho Asakusa Kinryūzan no zu (View of Sensōji Temple, Asakusa) on crepe paper (chirimen-e) dates to 1861; and his great Daigaran hōyō no zu (Great Temple Buddhist Ceremony) triptych dates to 1863. The print of Satō Masakiyo hunting the magic two-tailed tiger, dated 1860, exemplifies the heroic-warrior triptych format that flourished in the late Edo period as audiences turned toward dramatic historical and legendary subjects. His series A Complete Picture of the Great Battle of Kawanakajima between Two Generals of Kō and Etsu (Kō-Etsu ryōshō Kawanakajima ōgassen zen), depicting the celebrated sixteenth-century clashes between Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen at the Kawanakajima plain, belongs to the wave of musha-e that responded to Kuniyoshi's pioneering Suikoden and warrior prints by extending the heroic-warrior genre across the Utagawa school.