Utagawa Kunisada III

Who They Were

Utagawa Kunisada III (三代目 歌川国貞) was an ukiyo-e artist — a designer of woodblock prints — who worked in Edo and later Tokyo between 1848 and 1920. He belonged to the Utagawa school, the dominant lineage of print designers in the late Edo period, and he specialised in yakusha-e (役者絵), pictures of kabuki actors. He was born in 1848, the first year of the Kaei era (嘉永), and died in Tokyo on 26 October 1920.

His career spans one of the sharpest ruptures in Japanese history. He was born under the Tokugawa shogunate, trained in the studios of the old city of Edo, and lived long enough to see the capital renamed Tokyo, the samurai class abolished, and the woodblock print industry collapse under competition from photography and mass-produced lithography.

Life and Career

Kunisada III entered the studio of Utagawa Kunisada I at the age of ten. The Utagawa school trained its students by having them copy their master's designs until they absorbed his line, his colour sense, and his commercial instincts; a talented pupil could be working on published prints within a few years. When Kunisada I died, the young artist continued his training under Kunisada II, the second holder of the name.

For the first part of his career he did not sign himself "Kunisada" at all. He published under the names Kunimasa (国政) and Baidō Kunimasa (梅堂国政). Around 1889 he began signing prints as Kunisada, Baidō Kunisada, or Kōchōrō Kunisada (高長郎国貞). By 1892 he had moved again, to Hōsai (豊斎) and its variants — Kōchōrō Hōsai, Baidō Hōsai, and Utagawa Hōsai.

This habit of changing names was normal in the Utagawa school, and it is the single greatest obstacle to reading ukiyo-e catalogues. A print signed "Hōsai" in 1895 and a print signed "Kunimasa" in 1870 may come from the same hand. The artist's son, Utagawa Kunimasa V, continued the family line of print designers into the twentieth century.

Why They Matter

Kunisada III is a witness to the end of ukiyo-e as a living commercial art. The actor print was the most commercially reliable genre in Edo printmaking: kabuki stars were the celebrities of the day, and fans bought portraits of them the way later audiences bought photographs of film actors. Kunisada III produced that product across the Meiji period, when the audience, the theatres, the printing techniques, and the city itself were all being remade.

His work also documents the mechanics of the Utagawa school. Because he trained under two successive masters and worked under at least six different art names, his prints show how the school transmitted style, how names functioned as brands owned by a studio rather than by an individual, and how a designer's identity was tied to a lineage rather than to a personal signature.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 三代目 歌川国貞, read in kana as うたがわ くにさだ さんだいめ, and romanised as Utagawa Kunisada, third generation (often written "Utagawa Kunisada III").

Breaking it down:

三 — read san here — means "three".

代 — read dai — means "generation" or "era". Together, 三代 (sandai) means "third generation".

目 — read me — means "eye", but in this position it is a counter, marking an ordinal: sandai-me is "the third", as in "the third holder of the name". This is the standard Japanese way of numbering successive holders of an inherited artistic or professional name.

歌 — read uta — means "song" or "poem".

川 — read gawa (voiced from kawa) — means "river". 歌川 (Utagawa) is therefore "song river", and it is the name of the school and lineage to which the artist belonged.

国 — read kuni — means "country" or "province".

貞 — read sada — means "upright", "chaste", or "loyal". 国貞 (Kunisada) is the art name itself, inherited from the first Kunisada.

The whole name therefore reads literally as "third-generation Utagawa Kunisada". Japanese naming of this kind is a chain of custody: the name is an asset held by the studio, and the number tells the reader which holder of it made the print. When a reader sees 三代目 歌川国貞 on a print, the 三代目 is doing the work that "III" does in English — but with the added implication that the name was inherited rather than chosen.

Legacy

Kunisada III's prints survive in museum collections and print catalogues, where they are usually studied as late examples of the Utagawa actor-print tradition rather than as the work of an individual innovator. The succession of signatures — Kunimasa, Baidō Kunimasa, Kunisada, Baidō Kunisada, Kōchōrō Kunisada, Hōsai, Kōchōrō Hōsai, Baidō Hōsai, Utagawa Hōsai — is itself the record of a career, and dating his prints depends on knowing which name he was using in which year.

His son, Utagawa Kunimasa V, carried the Utagawa printmaking line forward, so the family's connection to the school outlasted the artist himself. Kunisada III died in Tokyo on 26 October 1920, by which time the woodblock print had ceased to be a mass medium and had begun its second life as an object collected, catalogued, and studied.