Sumo Wrestling

Sumo Wrestling is a nineteenth-century work by Utagawa Kuniteru in ink on paper, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession 60.129) and digitized through the museum's Open Access initiative. The image belongs to the genre of sumō-e — prints and paintings depicting professional sumo wrestlers, a category of Edo-period popular imagery that emerged in the 1780s and developed an extensive iconography over the next century. Sumō-e ran in parallel to actor prints (yakusha-e) as a celebration of contemporary popular performers: like kabuki actors, leading sumo wrestlers were public personalities whose statistics, ring names, and stable affiliations were widely tracked, and prints of them in the dohyō (ring) circulated as collectible portraits and as souvenirs of specific tournaments. Kuniteru I's teacher Kunisada I had been one of the most prolific sumō-e designers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and Kuniteru's continuation of this genre places him squarely within the Utagawa school's repertoire. The medium of this particular work — ink on paper rather than full-color woodblock printing — suggests it may have functioned as a preparatory study or as an independent painted sketch rather than as a finished commercial print, a useful reminder that nineteenth-century print designers also produced significant works in painted formats.