Utagawa Toyokuni II

Utagawa Toyokuni II (二代目歌川豊国, 1777-1835), known until 1825 by the art name Toyoshige (豊重) and afterwards signing with the gō Gosotei (後素亭), is one of the quietly consequential — and posthumously contested — figures in the Utagawa school of Edo print designers. The principal pupil and adopted son-in-law of Utagawa Toyokuni I (1769-1825), he carried the Utagawa headship through the decade between his teacher's death and his own, only to be overshadowed by his rival and fellow Toyokuni I pupil Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865), who from 1844 claimed the Toyokuni name in a way that effectively wrote Toyoshige out of the lineage. The modern restoration of his identity as the legitimate Toyokuni II — driven by the British Museum's authority record (BIOG6956) and the Art Institute of Chicago's work on the Clarence Buckingham Collection — has returned a distinctive body of yakusha-e (actor prints), bijin-ga (beautiful women), and landscapes to a designer who in his own lifetime was the official successor to the Utagawa workshop.

Born in 1777, Toyoshige entered Toyokuni I's studio in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when the workshop was already the dominant force in commercial ukiyo-e publishing in Edo. Toyokuni I had inherited the Utagawa lineage from its founder Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814) and reshaped its output around yakusha-e and bijin-ga for the booming Kansei and early Bunka markets. Toyoshige's earliest signed prints, signed 'Toyoshige ga,' show him working in his teacher's hand on actor portraits, paired bijin compositions, and book illustrations for the same Edo publishers — Tsuruya Kinsuke, Ibaya Senzaburō, Iseya Rihei — who handled Toyokuni I. He married Toyokuni I's daughter and was formally adopted as his son and heir, a relationship that under Edo atelier conventions made him the unambiguous successor to the workshop and to the master's name.

When Toyokuni I died in Bunsei 8 (1825), Toyoshige took up the Toyokuni signature, signing his prints as 'Toyokuni' or 'Gosotei Toyokuni' — the Gosotei studio name distinguishing him from his teacher in informed eyes. This is the signature on his best-known work: the landscape series Eight Views of Famous Places (Meisho hakkei, c. 1833-34) issued by Sanoya Kihei, and Ten Views of Cherry Trees in the Eastern Capital (Tōto sakuragi jikkei) of the same period — both Utagawa-school answers to the landscape revolution being driven by Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Hiroshige's contemporary Tōkaidō. The Meisho hakkei, organized around the Chinese Eight Views convention and applied to sites in the Edo hinterland (Mount Fuji at Shimo Sengen, Ōyama, Kamakura, Enoshima, Atami, the Tama River, Kanazawa), survives in near-complete sets at the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, and Cleveland (1985.357). Toyoshige also continued to produce yakusha-e and surimono, including the Met's surimono of Ichikawa Danjūrō IV as Kagekiyo (c. 1834, JP1750), one of the few full-figure surimono actor portraits to survive from the late Bunsei and early Tenpō periods.