Builders

Builders, an Edo ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunisada accessible through ukiyo-e.org from the Asian Art Museum's collection, departs from the artist's more familiar yakusha-e and bijinga production to present a scene of carpenters and laborers at work. Genre subjects of this kind, drawn from the trades of Edo's commoner population, were a minor but persistent thread in the nineteenth-century print market. They sat alongside the dominant categories of actor and beauty portraiture and were often valued for their documentary candor about urban Edo working life. Kunisada renders the figures with the muscular shoulders and exaggerated, focused expressions that he had developed in his warrior and Suikoden prints, but the implements here are mundane: adzes, planes, framing timbers, scaffolding. The composition is densely populated, with overlapping bodies arrayed across the picture plane in a manner reminiscent of the artist's group actor scenes. Genre prints of carpenters and other tradesmen also served as informal celebrations of Edo's craft-based identity, a city whose economy depended on rebuilding after frequent fires and on the dense apprentice networks of the construction trades. As Toyokuni III in his later years, Kunisada was leading a workshop large enough to handle commercial commissions across genres, and prints like this would have appealed to a buyer interested in scenes of everyday work rather than the kabuki stage. The Asian Art Museum impression catalogued by ukiyo-e.org provides a digital reference for studying this less-frequently encountered facet of his output.