Memorial Portrait of Utagawa Kunisada I (Kochoro Toyokuni shozo)

Memorial Portrait of Utagawa Kunisada I (Kōchōrō Toyokuni Shōzō) is a posthumous likeness within the Utagawa Toyokuni lineage, held in the Art Institute of Chicago. By the time of its production in 1864, the Toyokuni name had passed to later generations of the Utagawa school, and the very subject of the portrait, Utagawa Kunisada I, had himself used the name Toyokuni III during a long and dominant career. The print honors Kunisada after his death by presenting him in formal robes with the visual gravity of a master portrait, accompanied by inscriptions that record his standing within the lineage and the affection in which he was held. Memorial portraits, or shini-e, were a recognized category of Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), often produced quickly after the death of a notable actor, poet, or designer, and they served both as documents of loss and as commemorative objects for collectors. In this case the subject is one of the great artists of the school, and the portrait carries the weight of marking the end of an era in Edo woodblock production. The Art Institute of Chicago catalogues the work with the date 1864, used here from the museum record. The print is a significant late example of how the Utagawa workshop's communal identity, in which [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e), [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), and memorial portraiture interleaved, was sustained by the continuing use and meaning of the Toyokuni name.