Memorial Portrait of Utagawa Kunisada I (Kochoro Toyokuni shozo)

This 1864 memorial portrait of Utagawa Kunisada I, drawn by a member of his own studio in the immediate aftermath of his death, is a self-reflexive monument of Edo ukiyo-e: an Utagawa-school shini-e for the most prolific Utagawa-school designer of all. Although attributed to Kunisada in standard catalogues, the print belongs to the genre of posthumous tributes that flowed from his workshop in 1864 and 1865 and is best understood as the school's collective leave-taking of its founder. Kunisada appears as Kochoro Toyokuni, the art name ("Toyokuni shozo" referring to the portrait of Toyokuni) he had used in the last phase of his career, dressed in priestly robes with the shaven head and rosary of an elder. The image rehearses the standard memorial vocabulary, kaimyo, jisei, and ritual offerings, but does so for the very figure who had himself designed the genre's most influential examples, a quiet acknowledgment that the practice of yakusha-e and bijinga in Edo had lost one of its central architects. Inscriptions identify Kunisada's principal personal names and trace the lineage of his studio names back through Toyokuni II and Toyokuni I. The portrait thus encodes both biographical and institutional information, signaling the orderly transmission of authority within the Utagawa school. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression as a key document for the history of nineteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e, recording the moment at which the dominant designer of the late Edo print market passed into memory.