Kunichika in the 1860s – the artist gains confidence
This is a batch of rather lovely prints that were being sold in Japan from a collection amassed over 45 years. The quality of the collection overall was very high and these are just a few that I bought from it, representing a range of Kunichika’s work over the 1860s. In this period we see him gaining in confidence and slowly finding his own style, moving away from the strictly Utagawa style of his teacher (Kunisada I / Toyokuni III), with narrow, angular faces, to a softer and more rounded style that he passed on to his disciples such as Chikashige & Chikanobu. We still see a mixture of compositions based around fairly simple backgrounds drawn as they would have appeared probably on the kabuki stage itself OR simply the actors floating in front of an abstract, graphical background.


