Utagawa Yoshikatsu

Utagawa Yoshikatsu (歌川芳勝, active circa 1840s-1860s), also signing as Isshūsai Yoshikatsu (一袖斎芳勝), was a Japanese woodblock print designer of the late Edo and early Meiji periods, one of the substantial cohort of pupils trained in the Edo studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). His exact dates of birth and death are not recorded in the surviving Japanese print literature, which is the common condition of all but the most celebrated Kuniyoshi pupils: the great master's studio admitted dozens of students over a forty-year career, and Yoshikatsu belongs to the middle rank of that group whose signed work survives in modest numbers in museum collections without an accompanying biographical record.

What is preserved of Yoshikatsu's career is reconstructed almost entirely from his prints themselves. His signed works begin to appear in the early 1840s, immediately after the Tenpō Reforms of 1842 had briefly suppressed yakusha-e (actor prints) and bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women) and forced Edo print publishers to reorient toward warrior subjects, historical narratives, and visual parodies that could plausibly claim educational or moral purpose. The historical and warrior genres that dominated the late 1840s suited the training Yoshikatsu had received under Kuniyoshi, whose own reputation rested on the dense, energetic musha-e (warrior prints) he had begun producing in the late 1820s with his famous Suikoden series. Yoshikatsu's earliest signed works inherit Kuniyoshi's dynamic figural drawing, his crowded battle compositions, and his characteristic mineral palette of densely printed blues, reds, and ochres against ink-black outlines. Among his documented early projects is a triptych depicting Lord Yoritomo's hunting party at the foot of Mount Fuji, dated to circa 1843-1847 — a treatment of one of the most familiar warrior-narrative subjects in the Edo print tradition, in which Minamoto Yoritomo's twelfth-century hunting expedition serves as the framing event for the celebrated boar-killing feat of the retainer Nitta Tadatsune. Yoshikatsu's version follows the iconographic conventions Kuniyoshi himself had established for the subject, with Tadatsune mounted on the back of the snarling boar in the right panel and the shogun's retinue arranged in the hills behind, the snow-capped peak of Fuji rising across the back of the central sheet.

In parallel with his warrior prints, Yoshikatsu designed yakusha-e — bust portraits and full-length actor studies of the leading Edo kabuki performers of the late Tenpō and Kōka eras (the late 1840s through the early 1850s). The Museum of Fine Arts Boston preserves an actor portrait by Yoshikatsu dated to 1847-1852, a representative example of the kind of yakusha-e he produced in modest quantity throughout the period. By the standards of the Utagawa school these are workmanlike rather than virtuosic compositions, but they document the participation of a middle-rank Kuniyoshi pupil in the steady commercial yakusha-e production of the late Bakumatsu Edo print market.