Memorial Portrait of Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi

This 1861 color woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)), held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (accession reference sc141327), is Utagawa Yoshitomi's memorial portrait (shini-e, or "death picture") of his teacher Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), produced within weeks of the master's death on the second day of the third month of Bunkyū 1 (April 1861). Kuniyoshi, signed in his lifetime with the gō Ichiyūsai (一勇齋), was the last great Edo designer of warrior prints ([musha-e](/glossary/musha-e)) and historical scenes, and the master of a remarkable generation of pupils whose names all began with the Yoshi character inherited from him. Shini-e were a long-established Edo convention by which pupils and admirers commemorated recently deceased artists, actors, kabuki performers, and other prominent figures with formal portrait prints bearing posthumous Buddhist names, the date of death, and elegiac inscriptions. Yoshitomi's portrait of Kuniyoshi is among the canonical shini-e of the Utagawa school and a primary document of the moment when the studio passed from its second great generation to its third; it survives in only a small number of impressions and is widely cited in modern scholarship on the Kuniyoshi lineage. The print belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's William Sturgis Bigelow Collection of Japanese prints, assembled during Bigelow's residence in Japan in the 1880s and bequeathed to the museum on his death in 1926. It is an indispensable visual document of the late-Edo Utagawa school and a personally significant late work by a junior pupil at the moment of his teacher's death.