Poem by The Monk Dōin

Poem by The Monk Dōin, dated 1845 in the records of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is one of the prints from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's contributions to the Edo ukiyo-e tradition of pairing classical poems with figural images. The poem of the monk Dōin is one of the verses of the Hyakunin Isshu, the canonical anthology of one hundred poets, and Kuniyoshi participated alongside other leading designers in series that married each poem to a figural scene drawn from history, drama or daily life. By doing so the publishers reached audiences who knew the verses from copybooks and parlor games and could enjoy the often allusive, sometimes humorous, association between text and image. Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) was famed for his warrior prints, but his work on poem-based series shows how comfortably he moved between heroic and literary subjects. The 1845 date places the sheet in his mature career, when his line and color sense were fully developed within the visual idiom of late Edo ukiyo-e. Trained under Utagawa Toyokuni I and central to the Utagawa school's mid-nineteenth-century output, Kuniyoshi gave figures in such poem prints the same compositional weight that he brought to his warrior prints, even when the subject was a relatively quiet poetic image. The Victoria and Albert Museum's catalogue preserves the attribution to Kuniyoshi, the date, and the poet's name; the description here follows that documentation and treats the work as a representative example of how poetry, drama and visual design were woven together in mid-nineteenth-century Edo print culture.