Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) / Toyokuni III (三代豊国) (artist 1786 – 01/12/1865)
View of Fujieda (Fujieda no zu: 藤枝ノ図) from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi: 東海道五十三次之内)
ca 1838
Signed: Kōchōrō Kunisada ga (香蝶楼国貞画)
No publisher's seal
No censor's seal
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Diet Library
Spencer Museum of Art
Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
British Museum - Hiroshige's 'Fujieda jimba tsugitate'
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art - they date their copy to 1836
Bryn Mawr
Honolulu Museum of Art
National Gallery, Prague
Fujisawa Ukiyo-e Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art All of the prints in this series are chūban sized. The example of this print in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is 9 13/16 x 7 3/16 in. This one in the Lyon Collection is fractionally smaller because it has been trimmed slightly at the top and along the right and left hand sides.
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Fujieda is about 4 miles from Okabe. In Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection, Honolulu Academy of Arts on page 186 it says: "Travelers on government duty, by presenting their official certificate with its red seal (shuinjō), paid no fee for using a man and horse, while commoners paid a fixed fee for these services. A more comfortable but more expensive way to travel overland was in a palanquin. The system may have been cumbersome at times, but it worked in an orderly fashion to facilitate the flow of people and cargo.
At the top center of this print [that is the Hiroshige], beyond the line of travelers and laborers, are two palanquins and a horse, ready for hire." Kunisada kept this last element, but rearranged the placement of the for-hire palanquins.
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This is number 23 in the series. The curatorial files at the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna say: "Kunisada shows the same scene as Hiroshige, but makes small changes to, for example, the position, posture and appearance of the individual persons."
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The setting is a relay station or toiyaba (問屋場 - a brokerage).
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Illustrated in a small color reproduction in Kunisada's Tokaido: Riddles in Japanese Woodblock Prints by Andreas Marks, Hotei Publishing, 2013, page 68, T24-23.
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)
beautiful woman picture (bijin-ga - 美人画) (genre)