The Revenge of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura)
Chushingura
About This Series
The Revenge of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) is Utagawa Hiroshige's contribution to one of the most heavily illustrated subjects of late-Edo culture, the legend of the forty-seven ronin who avenged their lord Asano Naganori by killing Kira Yoshinaka in 1703 and were then ordered to commit seppuku. By the early nineteenth century the story had been thoroughly absorbed into kabuki and bunraku through the play Kanadehon Chushingura, whose eleven acts provided the canonical episodic structure that ukiyo-e designers adopted for their serial print sets. Hiroshige's Chushingura cycle, of which several distinct sets and formats survive from across the 1830s and 1840s, follows the play's eleven-act sequence and translates each scene into a print sized variably as oban, chuban, or fan format depending on publisher and subscription. As a designer trained in the Utagawa school, he handled the historical-legendary subject with the figure-and-narrative competence the school demanded of its members, but his Chushingura prints are distinguished from the more drama-saturated treatments of Kuniyoshi and other contemporaries by their atmospheric settings, in which his developed fukei-e vocabulary of low horizon, bokashi-modulated sky, and topographically observed ground provides the stage for the figural action. The series belongs to the broader Chushingura industry of late-Edo print publication, in which most major Utagawa designers contributed at least one set and in which the figural and emotional registers of treatment varied widely. Publishers associated with such cycles in this period included Sanoki, Yamamotoya Heikichi, and other firms active in the historical print trade. Modern scholarship treats the Hiroshige Chushingura sets as evidence of his range beyond strict landscape and as illustrations of how the landscape designer could absorb a heavily figural subject into his characteristic atmospheric idiom, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors of both Chushingura iconography and of Hiroshige's mid-career production.
Prints in This Series (3)
Frequently Asked Questions
The Revenge of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) is Utagawa Hiroshige's contribution to one of the most heavily illustrated subjects of late-Edo culture, the legend of the forty-seven ronin who avenged their lord Asano Naganori by killing Kira Yoshinaka in 1703 and were then ordered to commit seppuku. By the early nineteenth century the story had been thoroughly absorbed into kabuki and bunraku through the play Kanadehon Chushingura, whose eleven acts provided the canonical episodic structure that ukiyo-e designers adopted for their serial print sets. Hiroshige's Chushingura cycle, of which several distinct sets and formats survive from across the 1830s and 1840s, follows the play's eleven-act sequence and translates each scene into a print sized variably as oban, chuban, or fan format depending on publisher and subscription. As a designer trained in the Utagawa school, he handled the historical-legendary subject with the figure-and-narrative competence the school demanded of its members, but his Chushingura prints are distinguished from the more drama-saturated treatments of Kuniyoshi and other contemporaries by their atmospheric settings, in which his developed fukei-e vocabulary of low horizon, bokashi-modulated sky, and topographically observed ground provides the stage for the figural action. The series belongs to the broader Chushingura industry of late-Edo print publication, in which most major Utagawa designers contributed at least one set and in which the figural and emotional registers of treatment varied widely. Publishers associated with such cycles in this period included Sanoki, Yamamotoya Heikichi, and other firms active in the historical print trade. Modern scholarship treats the Hiroshige Chushingura sets as evidence of his range beyond strict landscape and as illustrations of how the landscape designer could absorb a heavily figural subject into his characteristic atmospheric idiom, and surviving impressions are valued by collectors of both Chushingura iconography and of Hiroshige's mid-career production.
The The Revenge of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) series contains 3 prints, created by Utagawa Hiroshige.
The The Revenge of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) series was created by Utagawa Hiroshige (歌川広重).
We currently have 3 of 3 known prints from the The Revenge of the Loyal Retainers (Chushingura) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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