Begonias of Mount Ashigara (Ashigarayama no shukaido): Bando Hikosaburo V as Yamauba, dated 1862, comes from the series Contemporary Versions of Thirty-six Selected Flowers (Tosei mitate sanjurokkasen) by Utagawa Toyokuni and is held in the Art Institute of Chicago. The series translates the classical pictorial tradition of thirty-six selected flowers into a contemporary kabuki idiom, pairing each blossom with a kabuki actor in a role that resonates with the flower's symbolic associations and traditional location. The pairing here links the shukaido begonia of Mount Ashigara, the mountain in Kanagawa Province famous as the boyhood home of the warrior Sakata no Kintoki and his foster mother the Yamauba, with the actor Bando Hikosaburo V cast as Yamauba herself, the mountain crone of Japanese legend. Mitate prints of this kind were a sophisticated Edo ukiyo-e invention, building a layered cultural pleasure that demanded knowledge of classical poetry, theatrical roles, and seasonal flora. Toyokuni's studio in the early 1860s specialized in such elaborately conceptualized yakusha-e under the Utagawa school's continuing market dominance. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the design with its full series title and role attribution, allowing the work to be reconnected with the larger thirty-six-sheet program. As a late Edo print produced on the eve of the Meiji transformation, the work stands as evidence of the genre's continued sophistication right up to the closing years of the Tokugawa world.
early 1830s
Color woodblock print; shikishiban, surimono
1796
Woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper
1769–1825
Woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Begonias of Mount Ashigara (Ashigarayama no shukaido): Bando Hikosaburo V as Yamauba, from the series "Contemporary Versions of Thirty-six Selected Flowers (Tosei mitate sanjurokkasen)" was created by Utagawa Toyokuni I (歌川豊国) in 1862.
Begonias of Mount Ashigara (Ashigarayama no shukaido): Bando Hikosaburo V as Yamauba, from the series "Contemporary Versions of Thirty-six Selected Flowers (Tosei mitate sanjurokkasen)" depicts birds & flowers.
