Lot 232B
Yoshimori Ukiyo-e Triptych, Arai, Tokaido
Yoshimori Ukiyo-e Triptych, Arai, Tokaido
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Utagawa "Ikkeisai" Yoshimori, also known as Taguchi Yoshimori (Japanese, 1830-1884). "Scenery of Arai" (Arai fukei), from the series "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido" (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), woodblock print triptych, ink and color on paper, 1863.. A panorama of feudal ceremony in three woodblock sheets, following the shogun's procession as it gathers at the water's edge of Arai, the thirty-first station of the Tokaido and the most heavily guarded crossing on the great eastern road. The composition reads from land to sea. At left, the tiled roofs of the post station rise behind a low wall, half-veiled in drifting cloud, while ranks of commoners press their foreheads to the ground in the obligatory obeisance owed a passing lord. The center sheet carries the procession forward along the shore, a column of attendants in conical hats and traveling cloaks bearing spears and feathered standards, marching beneath wind-bent pines toward a guard tower at the lake's margin. At right the cortege reaches the boats, their masts strung with rigging and their sails emblazoned with clan crests, the feathered standard of the daimyo train streaming against a sky banded with the rose of early dawn. Size of each panel: 9.6" W x 14" H (24.4 cm W x 35.6 cm H); of all together: 28.8" W x 14" H (73.2 cm W x 35.6 cm H).
Arai owed its importance to geography and to fear. Here the Tokaido met the brackish waters of Lake Hamana, and travelers crossed the Imagire channel by boat, the only sea passage on the entire route between Edo and Kyoto. Guarding that chokepoint stood the Arai barrier, the strictest checkpoint on the road, charged above all with intercepting two things: firearms moving toward the capital and women fleeing it, the twin contraband that a watchful shogunate read as the seeds of rebellion. To stage the shogun's own procession at this place, in 1863, was to invoke the full machinery of Tokugawa authority at the very moment that authority was failing. Iemochi's journey to Kyoto, the first by a sitting shogun in more than two centuries, was less a display of power than a summons to answer for it, and the print's stately order carries, in hindsight, the weight of an order about to end.
Yoshimori came to the subject through the busiest studio of the age, trained under Utagawa Kuniyoshi and best known in his own day for Yokohama-e, the vivid records of the newly opened treaty port and the foreigners who streamed through it. The procession series let him turn from the novelties of the present to the pageantry of the receding past, a tension that defines the work of his generation, poised between the closing world of the bakufu and the foreign-facing century rushing in. The sheet belongs to a tradition of Tokaido imagery that Hiroshige had made beloved three decades earlier, now repurposed as reportage and elegy at once, a record of the shogun in motion across a landscape he would not hold much longer.
Series and station title cartouche upper right of the right sheet. Signed "Ikkeisai Yoshimori ga" ("drawn by Ikkeisai Yoshimori") at lower right of the right sheet and lower left of the left sheet, each with the artist's round seal, accompanied by publisher and censor seals at the lower margins.
About the artist: Yoshimori Utagawa (born Taguchi Sakuzo, 1830; died 1884 or 1885) trained under Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the most theatrically gifted designer of the late Edo period, and carried that lineage into one of the most turbulent transitions in Japanese history. Working across woodblock prints, illustrated books, and political satire, he proved as comfortable with warrior prints and bird-and-flower compositions as with giga, the tradition of comic caricature.
He is best remembered for his Yokohama-e, prints documenting the sudden, bewildering spectacle of Japan's newly opened treaty port: foreign merchants, steam-powered machinery, and unfamiliar fashions crowding the wharves of a city that had barely existed a generation earlier. The series he contributed to in 1863, depicting the procession of Shogun Iemochi Tokugawa along the Tokaido Road to Kyoto, captured the full ceremonial grandeur of the shogunate at the precise moment of its unraveling. Nine years later, as one of five artists who collaborated on "Calligraphy and Pictures along the Fifty-three Stations," he returned to the Tokaido with a Meiji eye, weaving imported technologies and poetic allusion into a subject the ukiyo-e tradition had made its own since Hiroshige.
Some sources record a late-career turn toward public life, with involvement in early political activity and a resignation dated to 1884 or 1885, though the record is inconclusive. He spent his final years in Yokohama, the city whose transformation he had spent decades documenting.
Provenance: private Las Vegas, Nevada, USA collection
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Item #
195216
- Condition: Fair. Three separate panels. Expected age wear with some creasing and wrinkling, as well as stains, discoloring, and areas of loss to pigments. Otherwise, imagery still very clear.
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