Album of Prints by Kikugawa Eizan, Utagawa Kunisada, and Utagawa Kunimaru

This nineteenth-century album of twenty-four woodblock prints, accessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1894 as JP205 (the gift of Mary L. Cassilly), combines works by Kikugawa Eizan, Utagawa Kunisada, and Utagawa Kunimaru. The album measures approximately 37.1 by 24.8 by 3.2 centimeters as a bound volume and is executed in ink and color on paper. As the earliest Japanese-print accession at the Met, the album marks the beginning of American institutional collecting of [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) and the pairing of Kunimaru with Eizan and Kunisada reflects the contemporary perception of him as part of a closely associated late-Bunka Edo network of [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) and [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) designers. Kikugawa Eizan was the leading bijin-ga specialist of the early nineteenth century, and his pairing with Kunisada (Toyokuni I's principal pupil) and Kunimaru (a fellow Toyokuni pupil) within a single album shows that contemporary Japanese collectors grouped Kunimaru with the other major beauty-picture designers of the Bunka and early Bunsei periods. The album's medium of ink and color on paper, and its bound format, suggest it was assembled for collector use rather than as an album of working impressions, and the Met's early acquisition of the volume gave the museum one of the foundational documents of nineteenth-century American interest in ukiyo-e print collecting.