Family Group

This undated woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada, recorded as 'Family Group' in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's collection of Japanese prints (aggregated by ukiyo-e.org), depicts a domestic scene of parents and children in the bijin-ga and genre register that Kunisada maintained alongside his vastly more visible yakusha-e production. Genre scenes of family life — mother and child, multiple generations gathered around a small task, or a stylish parent with a young child in tow — were a familiar subset of late Edo ukiyo-e and offered designers an opportunity to combine figure composition with the visual repertoire of toys, festival accessories and seasonal motifs that gave the prints their charge for chōnin viewers. Kunisada renders the figures in his mature bijin manner, with long oval faces, narrow elongated eyes and the slightly mannered, calligraphic mouths that distinguish his work from Eisen or Eizan; the children are drawn at a smaller scale but with the same precise contour. Patterned kimono, hair ornaments and a child's playthings provide the principal pictorial event, and the print depends on the cooperation of the carver and printer to realise overprinted gradations and dense fabric pattern. As with many Kunisada bijin sheets, the design probably depended on a specific contemporary actor performance — the family-group composition could double as a tableau quoting a kabuki domestic scene — but the museum record does not identify the play. The aggregation of the image through ukiyo-e.org preserves the artist attribution while leaving the precise series and date for future identification.