Shaping the present, crafting the past: imaging self-narrative in the life and work of Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900)
The artist Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900) is today recognised as one of the leading figures in the history of Meiji-era nishiki-e prints, and particularly in the field of kabuki actor imagery. He belonged to a generation of nishiki-e woodblock print designers born and trained in the late Edo period (1603–1867[1868]) who came to artistic maturity during the following Meiji era (1867[1868]–1912). The socio-political, technological, and cultural changes occurring in the Meiji era posed new challenges to the long-established industry of woodblock prints. By the end of the nineteenth century figures like Kunichika came to be seen as representatives of past Edo-period culture operating in a present Meiji cultural milieu. This was despite the fact that many connoisseurs, collectors, and scholars from this time to the early to mid-twentieth centuries dismissed woodblock prints created in the late Edo and Meiji periods. The aim of this study of Kunichika’s life and art is two-fold. First, it seeks to redress the stereotypical view that late Edo and Meiji prints embody a period of ‘decline’ and ‘decadence’, as upheld by writers from the later nineteenth century onwards, and advances our understanding of the qualities of nishiki-e of this period. It will show that the Meiji commercial print industry, although subject to different cultural considerations and economic hurdles, remained buoyant until the end of Kunichika’s life, and that print designers, writers, and actors of the age actively collaborated in the production of prints. Secondly, an examination of Kunichika’s October 1898 ‘Meiji no Edokko’ interview in the Yomiuri shinbun, as well as contemporary newspaper reports and his prolific body of work in the genre of nigao-e (‘likeness pictures’), sheds light on this artist’s views regarding his own place within the nineteenth-century woodblock print tradition and his self-identification (and self-narrative) as a ‘master of kabuki actor prints’ (nigao-e shi).
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