Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin Act I (Historical event of 1701)

Tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin, Act I (Historical event of 1701) by Utagawa Hiroshige opens his treatment of Japan's most celebrated story of loyalty and vengeance: the 1703 attack by the masterless samurai of Ako on the Kira mansion in Edo, in retaliation for the 1701 death of their lord Asano. Kabuki transformed the historical incident into the play Kanadehon Chushingura, and ukiyo-e artists produced countless print series that followed the play's acts. Hiroshige, while celebrated above all for the landscape print, joined in the production of these narrative cycles; Act I traditionally stages the early confrontation between Asano and Kira (often coded as En'ya and Moronao in the kabuki text), the seed of the whole tragedy. In an Edo ukiyo-e idiom, the print pairs precise figure drawing -- ceremonial costumes, careful hierarchies of pose -- with the architectural and natural setting of the shogun's castle environs. Hiroshige's particular gift is to give the scene a landscape consciousness: a glimpse of garden, a sweep of palace roof, a band of color across the sky that situates the action within a larger Edo world. The impression in the Audrey and Harry Hahn Gift at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, indexed on ukiyo-e.org, marks the opening of his Chushingura cycle and aligns him with the long Utagawa-school tradition of illustrating this defining narrative.