KunstenaarJapanese
Utagawa Kunisada
1 actieve items
Born in 1786 in Honjo, a merchant district on the eastern bank of Edo's Sumida River, Utagawa Kunisada entered the workshop of master printmaker Utagawa Toyokuni I around 1800. He was assigned the artist name Kunisada - incorporating the character "kuni" from his master's name - and by 1807 had produced his first known woodblock print. Within a decade he had outpaced every rival in the city.
Kunisada worked almost exclusively in two subject categories that he understood with extraordinary precision: yakusha-e, portraits of kabuki actors in role, and bijin-ga, images of fashionably dressed women. Together these account for well over three-quarters of his catalogued output. His actor prints were not mere likenesses but psychological studies - he captured the charged stillness of a dramatic pause, the angle of a sleeve, the slight tension in a jaw. Audiences at the Edo kabuki theaters could buy a Kunisada print and hold in their hands something that felt as electric as the performance itself.
His output was staggering by any measure. Approximately 20,000 individual designs have been catalogued, corresponding to more than 35,000 individual sheets - a rate that averages close to one finished composition per day across his sixty-year career. He worked in oban tate-e format (roughly 38 x 26 cm) for most of his single-sheet prints, but also produced lavishly detailed triptychs and diptychs. Among his most admired series is the collaboration with Utagawa Hiroshige on the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido (1854), in which Kunisada provided the figural foreground and Hiroshige the landscape insets - a rare instance of two masters sharing a single sheet. He also designed the series "Beauties of the Fifty-Three Stations" (1852–53), recasting the famous highway posts as backdrops for contemporary women in seasonal dress.
In 1844 Kunisada assumed the title Toyokuni III, adopting the lineage name of his master's school, a claim that generated controversy but consolidated his authority over the Utagawa workshop. He trained dozens of pupils, including Toyohara Kunichika, and in his later years many designs were executed in part by advanced students working from his preparatory sketches. Despite this, the quality of composition remained remarkably consistent. His work is held in depth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Rijksmuseum.
On Auctionet, Kunisada appears primarily through European auction houses: Dorotheum Vienna accounts for the majority of the 36 indexed items, with Bukowskis in Stockholm and Helsinki also offering prints regularly. Realized prices at Nordic houses have ranged from a few hundred SEK for single sheets to over 1,500 EUR for collaborative triptychs with Toyohara Kunichika. Actor portraits and snow-scene prints have attracted the strongest buyer interest, and 10 items remain active at present.