Utagawa Yoshifuji

Utagawa Yoshifuji (歌川芳藤, 1828-1887), who also worked under the art name Ippōsai Yoshifuji (一鵬斎芳藤), was a late-Edo and early-Meiji ukiyo-e designer based in Edo (Tokyo) and a pupil of the great Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). Although Yoshifuji produced a substantial body of conventional yakusha-e (actor prints), musha-e (warrior prints), historical scenes, and Yokohama-e (prints depicting foreigners in the newly opened treaty port), he is best remembered as the leading designer of omocha-e (玩具絵), the popular Japanese genre of "toy prints" produced specifically for children. His prolific output in this category earned him the affectionate nickname "Omocha Yoshifuji" (the Toy Yoshifuji), and modern scholars and collectors often refer to him as the father of the omocha-e tradition.

Yoshifuji was born in Edo in 1828, the son of an embroidery artisan. He entered the studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi while still in his teens and emerged as one of the most accomplished of the dense generation of Kuniyoshi pupils, whose ranks also included Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Utagawa Yoshiiku, Kawanabe Kyōsai, and Utagawa Yoshikazu. Like his teacher, Yoshifuji was a versatile and imaginative draughtsman with a strong taste for visual wit, optical games, and inventive composition, qualities that would become hallmarks of his mature omocha-e practice. From the late 1840s through the early 1860s his output spanned the standard Utagawa school genres: portraits of kabuki actors, scenes from historical romances such as the Chūshingura cycle and the campaigns of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Oda Nobunaga, and the new genre of Yokohama-e that flourished after the opening of Japan in 1859.

It is the omocha-e genre, however, that defines Yoshifuji's place in Japanese print history. Omocha-e were inexpensive woodblock-printed sheets aimed at the children's market, encompassing a wide range of subtypes: kumiage-e (組上絵, cut-and-assemble paper construction prints that built up into models of buildings, palanquins, or boats), sugoroku (双六, illustrated board games played with dice), karuta (歌留多, illustrated playing cards), tsuna mori-e or hitachi-e (visual puzzle prints in which a complex composition could be read as either one image or many figures), and oshie or mitate-e (clever transformations and trick prints). They sometimes carried educational content as well, teaching children the syllabary, the names of provinces, or the costumes of foreign nations. Yoshifuji designed prints of every kind across the late 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, and his work in the genre is by some margin the largest and most inventive surviving corpus by any single designer.

A recurring formal device in Yoshifuji's omocha-e is the multi-figure optical puzzle, in which a group of human bodies, animals, or objects has been arranged to suggest a different reading at a distance, a tradition with roots in the older yose-e or "gathered picture" idiom. His celebrated 1861 print "Five Men Doing the Work of Ten Bodies" (Gonin jūshin no hataraki), preserved in multiple impressions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts five entwined male figures whose limbs combine to suggest ten people at work, a kind of visual riddle that delighted children and adults alike.