Actor Ichikawa Danjuro VIII as Narihira at Yatsuhashi from "A Six-fold Screen of Famous Pictures (Meiga rokushi byobu)"

Actor Ichikawa Danjuro VIII as Narihira at Yatsuhashi, from A Six-fold Screen of Famous Pictures (Meiga rokushi byobu), is a yakusha-e by Utagawa Kuniyoshi published in 1847. The print fuses two well-loved Edo subjects, kabuki portraiture and the classical literary world of The Tales of Ise, by casting the celebrated star Ichikawa Danjuro VIII in the role of Ariwara no Narihira pausing at the Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges) of Mikawa, the famous stop where he gazed at irises and composed an acrostic poem on his sense of exile. Kuniyoshi, an Edo ukiyo-e master of the Utagawa school best known for warrior prints, treats Narihira's elegant figure with the same compositional confidence that animates his musha-e, building the design around a strongly modeled portrait of the actor surrounded by iris stalks, water, and zigzag bridge planks. The Meiga rokushi byobu series conceit, references to famous painted screens, places this image within a self-conscious dialogue between popular print and high-cultural pictorial tradition, an approach particularly congenial to Kuniyoshi's eclectic interests. Issued in 1847, a period of partial recovery from the Tenpo Reforms, the print exemplifies the way Edo publishers and their artists used classical themes to give actor prints additional cultural legitimacy. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves this impression (artworks/81826) within its substantial Kuniyoshi holdings, where it stands as a fine example of the artist's ability to bridge classical poetry and contemporary kabuki celebrity in a single multi-block color woodblock design.