Kunisada Utagawa

Kunisada Utagawa, “Archer Katsuta Taketaka”, Edo Period, 1603-1868, Color Woodblock Print, 37.3 x 25.8 cm, Private Collection

Kunisada Utagawa (歌川国貞), also known as Sandai Utagawa Toyokuni (三代歌川豊国), was considered the most popular and prolific Japanese ukiyo-e color woodblock artist in nineteenth-century Japan. His reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries Andō Hiroshigo, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, all great masters of the tradition.

Details of Kunisada’s life are scarce; however, he was born in Honjo, an eastern district of Edo with the given name of Sumida Shōgorō IX (角田庄五朗). His family owned a small licensed ferry boat service which provided income for him to engage in painting and drawing. Kunisada’s early work impressed Utagawa Toyokuni, a distinguished master of ukiyo-e kabuki actor prints and second head of the famous Utagawa school of woodblock artists. Circa 1800, Kunisada was accepted as an apprentice in Toyokuni’s workshop and, keeping the tradition of master/apprentice, was given the name Kunisada (国貞).

Utagawa Kunisada’s early full-sized prints began to appear in 1809-1810. He was already an illustrator of e-hon, woodblock print illustrated books, in 1809 and was considered at least the equal to his teacher Toyokuni in regards to book illustrations. Kunisada was at this time creating actor portraits and urban scenes of Edo. By 1813, he was positioned in second place behind Toyokuni on a list of the most important ukiyo-e artists in Japan. Utagawa Kunisada would remain one of the trendsettters of Japanese woodblock printing until his death in january of 1865, on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month of the First Year of Genji.

Notes: For the woodblock print illustrated in the header, Utagawa Kunisada used the kabuki actor Iwai Shijaku I as the model for archer Katsuta Shinzaemon Takekata. Iwai Shijaku I, also known as Iwai Hanshirō VII, was the oldest son of Iwai Hanshirō V and a frequent model for works by Kunisada. Born in 1804, Shijaku I died in 1845.

Insert Image: Kunisada Utagawa, “Kabuki, Chushingura Act 11”, 1864/1865, Color Woodblock Ptint, “Seichu Gishi Den (Biographies of Loyal and Faithful Samurai” Series, Private Collection

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Yashima Gakutei

Yashima Gakutei, “Carp Ascending a Waterfall”, 1892 (Edo Period), Surimono, Woodblock Print with ink and Color on Paper, 18.8 x 21.6 cm, Private Collection

Born in the Honshu city of Osaka circa 1786, Yashima Gakutei (八島岳亭) was a Japanese poet and artist known for the quality of his woodblock prints and his artistic contribution to Ukiyo-e (浮世絵) a traditional poetic art form that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth-century. Among the images depicted in ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings were landscapes, wrestlers and kabuki actors, dancers and courtesans, folk tales and historic scenes, and images of an erotic nature.

Gakutei was the illegitimate son of the samurai Hirata under the Tokugawa shogunate established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康), one of the three Great Unifiers of Japan during the Edo period. Gakutei’s mother later married into the Yashima clan, thus granting him the name of Yashima Gakutei. He received his art training from master ukiyo-e printmakers Totya Hokkei (魚屋北渓) and Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎) who, though best known for his woodblock print series “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, worked in multiple mediums including book illustration.

After his training, Yashima Gakutei settled at Osaka in the 1830s. He was known for his technical precision, his embossing skill, and his specialization in the traditional surimono art form, which some critics say surpassed that of his teacher Totya Hokkei. These surimono (摺物) woodblock prints were deluxe editions privately commissioned by poetry societies and wealthy patrons of the arts for special occasions, poetry competitions, and the celebration of the New Year. Gakutei employed lavish printing techniques on the finest homemade papers with generous use of gold, silver, bronze, and mica highlights, as well as embossing and lacquer-like effects.

During his career, Gakutei also created images of landscapes and seascapes for books, a rarity among those artists who had studied under Hokusai. He received a commission to provide all the illustrations for the “Kyōka Suikoden (狂歌水滸伝)”, a volume of traditional Japanese poetry. Among Gakutei’s other works are a series of five surimono woodblock prints that featured young female musicians performing gagaku (雅楽), the traditional imperial court music from the Heian period (794 to 1185); a series of embossed woodblock prints depicting all the gods of fortune as beautiful women, or bijin (美人); and a privately issued and embossed surimono tetraptych entitled “The Ascent to Heaven”, a four-panel scene depicting the well known Japanese fairy story “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”.

As a poet, Yashima Gakutei wrote and illustrated many humorous poems in the kyōka (狂歌) style, a genre of Japanese tanka poetry that was prevalent in the Edo region, now the area of modern Tokyo. Formed within the tanka meter of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line, these short poems placed mundane or vulgar humor within elegant, poetic settings. Wordplay and puns were often used; a classic styled poem would often be given a vulgar twist at the end.

As a translator, Gakutei is known for his translation of the sixteenth-century Chinese novel “Journey to the West (西遊記)”, one of the Classic Chinese Novels that is attributed to Ming dynasty poet and novelist Wu Cheng’en (吳承恩). This account of the legendary pilgrimage of Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang was illustrated with woodblock prints created by Gakutei.

Yashima Gakutei died in 1868, the same year as the Meiji Restoration that replaced the Tokugawa shogunate military government with a reinstallation of Emperor Meiji under a constitutional monarchy, thus ending Japan’s Edo period.

Notes: Many of the details of Yashima Gakutei’s life are shrouded in mystery. The Art Institute of Chicago indicates that he was known by several names including Yashima Harunobu, Horikawa Tarô, and Gakutei Kyûzan, among others. The Ronin Gallery, the largest collection of Japanese prints in the United States, lists his birthplace as Edo under the name of Harunobu Sugawara. For my article, I am relying on information from the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, which lists his birthplace as Osaka.

Top Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Hotei”, circa 1927, “Allusions to the Seven Lucky Gods”, Woodblock Print with Karazuri Printing and Metallic Pigment, 21 x 18.4 cm, Ronin Gallery

Second Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Muneyuki Shoots a Tiger”, circa 1829, Woodblock Print Surimono, 21 x 18.4 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Yashima Gakutei, “Furuichi Dance”, circa 1822, Woodblock Print with Ink and Color, Embossing and Metallic Pigments, 21 x 19 cm, Private Collection

Jan Mankes

The Artwork of Jan Mankes

Born in August of 1889 in the city of Meppel, Jan Mankes was a Dutch painter whose restrained, detailed work included self-portraits, landscapes and detailed studies of animals and birds. Although he developed a reputation as an ascetic, Mankes was well acquainted with both events and artists in the Netherlands.

The son of tax inspector Beint Jans Mankes and Genty Hartsuyker, Jan Mankes began his initial education in 1902 at Meppel; however, after his father received a new assignment, the family moved in 1903 to Delft, a city in South Holland. Beginning in 1904, Mankes studied at the Delft workshop of painter and stained glass artist Jan Lourens Schouten. In his free time, he also trained in stained glass techniques at the workshop of Hermanus Veldhuis and often assisted Veldhuis in his work. There is evidence Mankes participated in the restoration of stained glass panels at Sint Janskerk, a Gothic-styled church in the city of Gouda.

Mankes often traveled to The Hague where he attended evening classes at its Academy of Fine Arts and studied the painting collections in the Mauritshuis Museum. He was particularly influenced by the work of sixteenth-century German artist and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painters Carel Fabritius and Johannes Vermeer. In 1908 at the age eighteen, Mankes showed his first paintings to his friend, Delft engraver Antoine van Derktsen Angers, who advised him to leave the glass works and devote himself to a career as a painter.

After the retirement of his father in 1909, Jans Mankes moved with his parents to the village of Bovenknipe in the northern province of Friesland. Inspired by its landscapes, he decided on the main themes for his work: portraiture and depictions of the natural world’s fauna and flora. From 1909 onwards, Mankes was supported financially by his patron from The Hague, tobacco merchant and major art collector A. A. M. Pauwels. His letters to Pauwels expressing gratitude for both money and materials were published in 2012 by the Netherlands Institute for Art History; Pauwels’s letters did not survive.

In 1911, Mankes created a portrait of Anne Zernike, a progressive Mennonite woman and Netherlands’ first female minister with a doctoral degree. This portrait is now housed in the collection of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden. In the same year, Mankes painted one of his most famous self-portraits, “Self-Portrait with an Owl”. His exposure in 1912 to the work of Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his woodblock prints, created a lasting impression on his work, especially in regard to simplicity of composition.

On the thirtieth of September in 1915, Mankes married Anne Sernike and the couple lived for several years in The Hague. After a diagnosis of tuberculosis, he and his wife relocated in 1916 to the city of Eerbeck in the central-eastern province of Gelderland. Two years later, the couple had their only child, a son named Beint after Mankes’s father. However by this time, Mankes’s health was steadily failing due to his tuberculosis. He died on the twenty-third of April in 1920 at the age of thirty.

In addition to private collections, Jan Mankes’s work is housed in the Netherland’s Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, the Museum Belvedere Heerenveen, the Rijksmuseum, and the MORE Museum in Gorssel as well as other international museums.

Top Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Self Portrait”, circa 1915, Pencil and Charcoal on Paper, 21 x 17.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Zelfportret met Uil (Self Portrait with an Owl)“, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 20.5 x 17 cm, Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Annie Zernike”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 34 x 32.5 cm, Museum for Modern Realism (MORE), Gorssel, The Netherlands