Sanjo'in no Nyukurodo Sakon / Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi

Sanjo'in no Nyukurodo Sakon, from the series Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi (From the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry, a Parody), is a Utagawa Kunisada design documented through the British Museum holdings as cataloged on ukiyo-e.org. Fujiwara no Sanekata, also known by the court name Nyukurodo Sakon associated with the cloistered emperor Sanjo, was a tenth- and early eleventh-century poet and aristocrat included in the canonical Sanjurokkasen, the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry compiled by Fujiwara no Kinto. The mitate convention permitted Edo ukiyo-e designers to substitute contemporary subjects, often kabuki actors, courtesans, or historical figures, for the classical poets of the canon, treating the Heian-period anthology as a numerical template into which fashionable visual content could be slotted. Kunisada's late-career studio practice is recognizable here in the confident outlines, the careful arrangement of cartouches, and the dense costume patterning calibrated for color-block contrast across multiple impressions. As one sheet of a structured thirty-six-print series, the design demonstrates how Edo ukiyo-e bound classical poetic memory and contemporary celebrity culture into a single commercial format. For collectors interested in the literary scaffolding of Utagawa school prints, Kunisada's mitate-sanjurokkasen sheets offer a particularly clear view of how poetry served as design infrastructure.