UTAGAWA, Kunitoshi 歌川国歳.

Manuscript on paper, entitled “Santō bunko: shohen” 山東文庫初編 [“The Santō Library: First Installment”].

27 double-page & 14 single-page brush & ink detailed drawings. 35 folding leaves. 12mo (185 x 130 mm.), orig. wrappers, orig. stitching. [Japan]: [late Edo or early Meiji].

A unique manuscript of underdrawings for ukiyo-e prints by an artist from one of the most prominent lineages active in the genre. While ukiyo-e are most famous in the form of colored prints from the “floating world” of Edo’s pleasure quarters and kabuki theaters, the originators of the genre’s designs were not printers or engravers, but painters. “The skillful use of brush and ink to render an image was central to the ukiyo-e artist’s task. These illustrator-designers were trained as painters. The brush was their primary tool, its practice the foundation for their art...for most their first images appeared as book illustrations” (Davis, p. 15). Indeed, our manuscript appears to contain illustrations intended for a printed book by a famous artist.

Kunitoshi was a student of Utagawa Kunisada 歌川国貞 (Sandaime Utagawa Toyokuni 三代目歌川豊国, or Toyokuni III, 1786-1865) and Utagawa Kunitsugu 歌川国次 (1800-61). Ukiyo-e were often produced by “artistic lineages”: “these ‘schools’ were established by a lead artist with an atelier of students and followers working in the same mode. The position of head of the school was usually handed down from father to artist sons, to sons-in-law, or to designated heirs. Apprentices usually entered the master’s atelier between the age of ten and early teens, and if they were found to be worthy practitioners of the master’s style, they would be adopted into the family and given its lineage name” (Davis, pp. 43-44). The author of our manuscript would have entered the Utagawa lineage in this way. The Utagawa lineage was “one of the [ukiyo-e] genre’s most productive and profitable through to the modern era.” The Utagawa “transformed the ukiyo-e genre, producing some of its most iconic images” (Davis, p. 88).

One page in our manuscript contains a legend stating, “Drawings by Toyokuni, created by Santō Kyōden” 豐國畫，山東京傳作. The title on the upper wrapper of the manuscript is indeed also “Santō bunko,” referring to the same person. Santō Kyōden (1761-1816) was a visual artist, writer, and businessman. We have been unable to determine which story by Kyōden is being illustrated here. It does not appear to be one set in the ninth century, however, as another pair of pages show men with muskets — a much later invention — surrounding a man reclining on a futon. Our manuscript contains many striking images, including yokai (妖怪) and yūrei 幽霊.

Very fine copy, preserved in a chitsu.

❧ Julie Nelson Davis, Picturing the Floating World: Ukiyo-e in Context (Hawai’i: 2021).