Mirror of Photography at Ryōgoku (Ryōgoku shashin kagami)

Mirror of Photography at Ryogoku (Ryogoku shashin kagami), an 1874 Edo ukiyo-e in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection, sits posthumously within Utagawa Kunisada's lineage; Kunisada the elder, working as Toyokuni III, had died in 1864, and 1874 dates from the Meiji era. Such a sheet would more typically be assigned either to the studio of his successor Toyokuni IV or to Kunisada II, both of whom inherited the Kunisada / Toyokuni signature line. The V&A catalogue, however, identifies the design in the broader Utagawa-school tradition that Kunisada founded. The subject is itself a marker of the transition from Edo to Meiji Japan: photography had arrived in Yokohama and Edo / Tokyo in the late Bakumatsu period, and Ryogoku, the great bridge district straddling the Sumida River, was a center of leisure and curiosity. To frame photography as a mirror (kagami) connects the new technology to the traditional metaphor of the bijinga subject contemplating her own reflection in a hand-mirror. The print blends woodblock visual conventions inherited from Kunisada's mature bijinga and yakusha-e with the modern subject matter that early Meiji Edo audiences increasingly demanded. Aniline reds and purples dominate the palette, and the figural style remains the long-faced beauty type that the Utagawa lineage had standardized. Whether one assigns the sheet to Kunisada the founder's late workshop or to his successors, it documents the visual continuity of Edo ukiyo-e into the changing technological landscape of early Meiji Japan.