Utagawa Kunisada

Kunisada was the most commercially successful designer of woodblock prints in nineteenth-century Japan. In his own lifetime his reputation comfortably exceeded Hokusai's, Hiroshige's and Kuniyoshi's — a ranking that later reversed almost completely, which is most of what makes him worth looking at now.

He trained under Toyokuni and eventually took the name Toyokuni III. His subject was the kabuki theatre and the world around it: actors in role, backstage, and the fashions of the audience. He was prolific to a degree that has counted against him with later critics, and the volume obscures how good the best of it is.

Because he fell out of fashion, his work has been reprinted far less than his contemporaries'.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗