Poem by Emperor Sutoku: Michiyuki

Poem by Emperor Sutoku: Michiyuki, designed by Utagawa Kunisada in 1845 and preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, belongs to the long tradition of mitate prints that pair classical waka poetry with contemporary kabuki subjects. The Hyakunin Isshu - the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each anthology - supplied the framing device used by many nineteenth-century Edo ukiyo-e artists, and Kunisada's series unites those courtly verses with the scenes audiences actually flocked to see in the Edo theaters. Emperor Sutoku's famous poem on the obstinacy of love is here visualized through a michiyuki, the travel-scene convention from kabuki and bunraku in which lovers journey together toward an inevitable fate. Kunisada deploys his signature yakusha-e idiom: actors with sharply defined chin lines, kimono patterned in dense polychrome key blocks, and a stage-like compression of foreground figures against patterned ground. The poem is inserted into a cartouche at the top, marrying the literary heritage of court Japan with the popular theatrical world of the Tempo and Koka eras. As Toyokuni III, the artistic identity Kunisada had assumed by this point, he was the most prolific actor portraitist of his time, and prints of this kind were marketed both to theater enthusiasts and to readers eager to display familiarity with classical poetry. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a deep collection of nineteenth-century Utagawa designs, of which this sheet is a representative example, showing how thoroughly mitate prints intertwined classical allusion and commercial Edo entertainment.