Fujiwara no Okikaze / Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi

Fujiwara no Okikaze / Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi, an Edo ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunisada documented at the British Museum and accessed via ukiyo-e.org, is part of his Mitate of the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals series. The Sanjurokkasen, the canonical Heian-period list of thirty-six exemplary poets compiled by Fujiwara no Kinto, had long served Japanese painters and printmakers as a respectable classical framework around which to organize portrait sets. Kunisada's mitate version transposes this courtly catalogue into the Edo present, pairing each poet with a contemporary kabuki actor, beauty, or genre figure that the audience could read against the original poem. Here Fujiwara no Okikaze, one of the original Heian poets celebrated for his autumnal melancholy, is matched with a figure drawn from Kunisada's bijinga or yakusha-e idiom. The poem and the poet's identification are placed in an inset cartouche above the figure, a structural device borrowed from the print artist's Hyakunin Isshu series. Kunisada's figural style is the mature Toyokuni III manner: long oval face, narrow eyes, small mouth, and a kimono carrying patterns of dense polychrome printing. The mitate device, with its layered allusion between classical poetry and the contemporary Edo entertainment world, was a hallmark of nineteenth-century Utagawa-school production and a key argument for the cultural seriousness of ukiyo-e. The British Museum catalogue confirms the attribution, and the ukiyo-e.org surrogate provides scholars with a high-resolution reference image.