Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi / Mibu no Tadamine

Mibu no Tadamine, one of the so-called Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry compiled by Fujiwara no Kinto in the eleventh century, is the classical figure stood in for here. The print belongs to the series Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi, in which Utagawa Kunisada pairs a contemporary kabuki actor or beauty with one of the canonical poets and a sympathetic seasonal motif. Such mitate-e were an Edo speciality: they flattered an audience that knew the Kokin wakashu and the standard anthologies, while letting the printmaker design at fashion-plate scale around current stage stars. Tadamine, whose anthologised verse leans toward dawn, autumn and quiet solitude, gives Kunisada room to lay in cool blues, muted purples and the long vertical of a robe, while a poem-card inset cites a single waka from the classical canon. The figure occupies almost the full vertical of the sheet, framed in the dense decorative manner Kunisada perfected as the head of the Utagawa school and the most productive designer of Edo ukiyo-e in the nineteenth century. The print is held in the British Museum and reproduced via ukiyo-e.org. While the sheet is not strictly a yakusha-e in the narrow sense, it is part of the same network of actor and beauty prints that Kunisada produced for the Edo print market in his later career. Image and bibliographic data are courtesy of ukiyo-e.org.