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Subject:Re: Help with Utagawa Kunisada woodblock
Posted By: geo. Tue, Jul 31, 2012
This is a print from one of the most successful print series ever.
The artist is Kunisada - here signing as "Toyokuni". The artist's seal is the elongated oval cartouche, gold trimmed, red with black lettering. The cartouche itself is the toshidama seal - the seal of the Utagawa school of which Kunisada was the head - with a gold silkworm on the top right edge. Here the seal is elongated from it's circular shape to accomodate the artist's signature "Toyokuni ga" (ga = drawn by). To the right of the artist's seal is the seal of the carver. It reads "hori take" (hori = carver). The carver's full name was Yokogawa Takejiro, here shortened to "take".
Above the artist's seal are the two round censor seals, here the seals of the censors "Mera" and "Watanabe". The slightly oval seal below and to the left of that is the date seal - here it is "Rat 3" (the third month of the year of the rat, 1852).
Further below that is the rectangular seal of the publisher - Iseya Kanekichi.
The large cartouche in the upper right says at the top "Tokaido gojusan tsugi" (53 stations of the Tokaido road). The rest I can't read (short of several hours of working through a character dictionary, which I don't feel inclined to do). But the actor in this print is Segawa Kikunojo and the staion is #18 "Okitsu".
The early impressions of this series had visible woodgrain in the sky area which yours lacks - indicating this as a later impression.
The whole concept of this series is a spinoff of sorts of the famous series by Hiroshige "53 Stations of the Tokaido Road" which was sort of picture postcard views of the various stations of the coastal roadway from Kyoto to Edo (Tokyo).
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- Michael - Jul 30, 2012 (08:47 PM) 
