Fujiwara no Kiyomasa / Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi

Fujiwara no Kiyomasa, from the series Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi (From the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry, a Parody), is a Utagawa Kunisada design documented through the British Museum holdings as cataloged on ukiyo-e.org. The Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry, sanjurokkasen, are a canonical grouping of waka poets established in the Heian period by Fujiwara no Kinto, comprising figures such as Ki no Tsurayuki, Ono no Komachi, and Ariwara no Narihira; the canon became one of the most-used numerical templates in Edo ukiyo-e, allowing artists to design serial sets of thirty-six prints with built-in classical authority. The mitate convention permitted designers to substitute contemporary subjects for the classical poets, often pairing each poet with a current kabuki actor, beauty, or historical figure whose attributes commented analogically on the original. Fujiwara no Kiyomasa here serves as one such pairing within the set, his characterization filtered through Kunisada's confident mature draftsmanship: firm outline, costume patterning calibrated for color-block contrast, and a face type recognizable across Kunisada's vast oeuvre. As a single sheet from a structured series, the print is an instructive example of how Edo ukiyo-e bridged classical literary culture and the celebrity portrait industry, using a canonical poetic grouping as the scaffolding for fashionable figure designs. For collectors building a Utagawa school selection, Kunisada's mitate-sanjurokkasen sheets are among the most pedagogically rich.