Poem by Shikishi Naishinnō: Hisamatsu and Osome

Poem by Shikishi Naishinnō: Hisamatsu and Osome was designed by Utagawa Kunisada in 1845 as part of a mitate (parody or visual analogy) series that pairs classical waka poetry with scenes from contemporary kabuki and popular literature. The sheet links a poem by Princess Shikishi (Shikishi Naishinnō, d. 1201), one of the major waka poets of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods, with the famous tragic lovers Hisamatsu and Osome, whose story was staged repeatedly on the Edo kabuki stage throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This kind of layered reference, where a 1200s court poem is yoked to a doomed merchant-class romance from a current play, is characteristic of Edo ukiyo-e and reflects the sophisticated literacy that publishers assumed in their urban audience. Kunisada specialized in yakusha-e and remained the dominant Edo designer of theatrical subjects after Kuniyoshi's death, but mitate series allowed him to flex a more poetic, allusive vocabulary while still trading on the visual appeal of well-known stage figures. The figures' costumes are rendered with the careful textile patterning that distinguishes his work from this period. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves this impression as O424720 and identifies it within the broader category of nineteenth-century Edo color woodblock prints, where it sits alongside other examples of Kunisada's poetic-theatrical pairings.