Utagawa Yoshimune

Utagawa Yoshimune I (歌川芳宗, 1817-1880), also known by the studio name Ishōsai (一笑齋) and as Hiroshige III's predecessor in certain Yokohama-e publications, was a Japanese woodblock print designer of the late Edo and early Meiji eras and one of the senior pupils in the second generation of the Utagawa school under Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861). Born in Edo (modern Tokyo) at the height of the Bunsei-era flowering of ukiyo-e, Yoshimune entered Kuniyoshi's studio while still a young man and trained in the boisterous, narratively driven idiom that had made his teacher the most popular print designer of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. He worked alongside the other senior "Yoshi"-named pupils — Yoshitora, Yoshikazu, Yoshifuji, Yoshiiku and the precocious Yoshitoshi — who together transmitted the Kuniyoshi tradition into the rapidly transforming visual culture of Bakumatsu and early Meiji Japan.

Yoshimune's output is documented across several genres of Edo-period and early Meiji print publishing. He produced musha-e (warrior prints) and ōzumō (sumo wrestling) compositions in the dramatic Kuniyoshi manner, including the early 1850s ōban triptych "Procession of Wrestlers for a Fundraising Match" (Kanjin ōzumō dohyō-iri no zu) now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, a vigorous record of the ceremonial entrance of sumo wrestlers into the ring during the charitable kanjin tournaments that were a major event in the Edo sporting calendar. He also worked extensively in the smaller chūban and aiban formats favored for landscape series and figure studies; a sustained group of more than two dozen sheets in the Victoria and Albert Museum, acquired together in 1886 from the dealer S. M. Franck & Co., suggests that Yoshimune produced numbered series of landscapes and figure compositions of a sort that would have circulated in modest editions through the Edo print trade.

The opening of Yokohama to foreign trade in 1859 transformed the print industry. Within months, Edo publishers were issuing Yokohama-e — woodblock prints depicting the European and American merchants, sailors, and consular families newly settled in the treaty port and the curious customs they brought with them. The genre was dominated by Kuniyoshi pupils, with Yoshitora, Yoshikazu, and Sadahide producing the largest numbers of Yokohama sheets. Yoshimune participated in this commercial moment as well, and his work is grouped with the other senior Kuniyoshi-school designers who documented the arrival of foreigners in Japan and the curiosities of Western dress, ships, animals, and architecture for an Edo audience hungry for visual information about the outside world.

Yoshimune also produced more intimate works for connoisseurs and bibliophiles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a remarkable set of three small books from circa 1860 catalogued as "Chapters 4, 5 of Legends of the Dog Warriors (Hakkenden)" in the form of hanshita-e — the preparatory drawings made by the print designer for transfer onto the block by the carver. The Hakkenden, Kyokutei Bakin's nineteen-year-long romance of eight dog warriors descended from a princess and a magical dog, was the most popular long-form novel of the late Edo period and a major source of subjects for warrior prints. Yoshimune's hanshita-e — drawn in ink and light colors on paper, each leaf around 17 by 12 centimeters — give a rare and intimate view of the working process by which a Utagawa-school designer translated literary narrative into the disciplined linework that printmakers required.