Yamabe no Akahito / Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi

Yamabe no Akahito, an eighth-century Manyoshu poet later canonised among the Thirty-Six Immortals of Poetry, is paired here with a contemporary kabuki figure. The print belongs to Utagawa Kunisada's Mitate sanjurokkasen no uchi, in which thirty-six classical poets are matched with thirty-six modern actors or beauties through the device of mitate, the designer-imposed parallel that lets two periods inhabit the same sheet. Akahito's anthologised verses tend toward Mount Fuji, plovers on the beach, and the formal beauty of imperial pilgrimage, all of which Kunisada and his publishers could anchor with a single inset poem-card and a sympathetic textile pattern. The dominant element of the design is the modern figure: full-length, robes patterned in the dense brocade of the late Edo period, face rendered in Kunisada's characteristic full-cheeked manner. By the time he issued this set, Kunisada had inherited the Toyokuni name and was the most productive designer of Edo ukiyo-e in the mid-nineteenth century. His mitate sets stand alongside his straight yakusha-e and bijinga as a way of demonstrating range; classical literacy is folded into the same fashion-plate apparatus that sold theatre prints. The British Museum impression is documented and reproduced through ukiyo-e.org. Image and bibliographic data are courtesy of ukiyo-e.org.