Utagawa Kunisada II

Who They Were

Utagawa Kunisada II was a Japanese artist who worked in the ukiyo-e tradition — the woodblock print genre whose name means "pictures of the floating world" (浮世絵, うきよえ). He was born in 1823 and died on 20 July 1880 in Edo, the city now called Tokyo. He was a painter, a print designer, and a xylographer, meaning he worked directly in the craft of woodblock carving and printing as well as in designing images.

He is counted among the three artists who carried the name "Utagawa Kunisada," and he headed the Utagawa school, the dominant lineage of print designers in nineteenth-century Japan. His career belongs to the Edo period (1603–1868) and to the years that followed it, when Edo was renamed Tokyo and Japan reorganised itself around a restored imperial court.

Life and Career

Kunisada II was born in Bunsei 6 (文政六年), the sixth year of the Bunsei era, which corresponds to 1823. The Bunsei era was the reign period of the emperor Ninkō, and its years fell in the later Edo period, when the Tokugawa shogunate governed from Edo and woodblock printing had matured into a mass commercial industry.

He trained within the Utagawa school, the workshop system that produced the best-known print designers of the age. The school's name passed from master to leading pupil, and Kunisada II was one of three men to hold the name Utagawa Kunisada. He also used the name Utagawa Toyokuni, taken in its fourth generation, which linked him to the founder of the line, Utagawa Toyokuni I.

His working life spanned the final decades of the Edo period and the first decades of the Meiji era. He died in Edo on 20 July 1880, at the age of 57. By then the city had already been renamed Tokyo, and the print market that had sustained the Utagawa workshop for generations was contracting under the pressure of photography and new printing technologies.

Why They Matter

Kunisada II matters first as a transmitter. The Utagawa school was not a single artist but an institution, and its continuity depended on named successors who took over a master's name, his students, and his commissions. By heading the school and holding the Kunisada name, he kept that structure running through a period of enormous political and social change.

He matters second as a craftsman across more than one stage of production. He is recorded as a xylographer as well as a designer and painter, which means he understood the block-carving side of printmaking, not only the drawing. In ukiyo-e, a finished print required a publisher, a designer, a block carver, and a printer; an artist who also carved belonged to the workshop world rather than to the fine-art salon.

He matters third as a witness to the end of an era. His death in 1880 falls in the Meiji period, after the shogunate had fallen and Edo had become Tokyo. The ukiyo-e industry he inherited was already being displaced, and the artists who carried the old workshop names into the 1870s and 1880s are the last generation of that tradition.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 四代目 歌川豊国, read in kana as よんだいめ うたがわ とよくに, and romanised as Yondaime Utagawa Toyokuni.

Broken down element by element:

• 四 (よん, yon) — "four."
• 代 (だい, dai) — "generation" or "succession."
• 目 (め, me) — a counter suffix used with ordinal numbers. Together, 四代目 (よんだいめ, yondaime) means "the fourth generation," the standard Japanese way of marking that a name has been inherited. It is the same construction used for the fourth holder of any hereditary professional name, in theatre, music, or the arts.
• 歌 (うた, uta) — "song" or "poem."
• 川 (がわ, gawa) — "river." The two together form 歌川 (うたがわ, Utagawa), the name of the school and workshop lineage. Note that 川 is read kawa on its own but voices to gawa inside this compound.
• 豊 (とよ, toyo) — "abundant," "rich," "bountiful."
• 国 (くに, kuni) — "country" or "province." Together, 豊国 (とよくに, Toyokuni) is the inherited artist name, meaning something like "abundant country."

So the full name announces its own history: it says "the fourth generation of the Utagawa line to be called Toyokuni." The same man is also referred to as 歌川国貞 (うたがわ くにさだ, Utagawa Kunisada), the other name he held within the school. The kanji 国 (くに, kuni) appears in both Kunisada and Toyokuni, a shared element that marks membership in the Utagawa house.

Legacy

Kunisada II's legacy is bound up with the mechanics of inheritance rather than with a single famous print. He is one of three artists to bear the name Utagawa Kunisada, and he held the fourth-generation Toyokuni name, which placed him in direct line from the school's founder. In the Utagawa system, a name was a licence to work under a recognised brand, and the man who held it was responsible for the workshop's output and its students.

He died on 20 July 1880 in Edo. The city of his birth and death had, within his lifetime, ceased to be the shogunal capital and become the imperial capital of Tokyo. The ukiyo-e workshop tradition he headed did not long outlast him in its classic form, which makes the artists of his generation the closing chapter of a print culture that had run for more than two centuries.