Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) late Kunisada Tokaido series part 1

Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III)	back to Kunisada Home

"The Tōkaidō", also "Famous Places along the Tōkaidō"
and "On the Tōkaidō"
known as "Processional Tōkaidō"

Tōkaidō (東海道), (Tōkaidō meisho no uchi, 東海道名所の内),
(Tōkaidō no uchi - 東海道之内) - (Gyōretsu Tōkaidō, 行列東海道)

last updated:

new information: 12/2021

OVERVIEW

Very uncommon Kunisada prints for a Tōkaidō series from different artists designed in 1863.
Related to this series Ch. van Rappard-Boon writes: " In the second month of 1863 the shogun Iemochi travelled from Edo to Kyoto to pay his respects to the emperor. Afterwards two special Tōkaidō series were published to commemorate this journey. ... One of the series is titled Tōkaidō and has prints by twelfe artists and twenty-one publishers. ... Both series contain more than the usual number of stations (55) ..." (L71, page 290).

About "The Tōkaidō" I read in an older Japanese auction catalogue that the series include 150 prints plus frontispiece, index page and so on.
And than Mr. Luigi Capretti sent me an email in which he wrote that he inherited 160 prints (plus) of the series bound to a book designed by 16 different artists (although the index sheet lists only 13 artists).
All of the prints in Mr. Capretti´s book have wonderful bright and fresh colours and may be first state and so I pleased him to take photos and to allow me to publish them on my site. With the friendly permission of the owner the complete series is presented to the public for the first time on this site.
The prints in Mr. Capretti´s collection all have full margins but the book has not been separated for taking the photos so not the complete print can be seen on the images.

In January 2007 Andreas Marks published the results of his investigations on this series in Andon 81 (the semi-annual publication of the Society for Japanese Arts). He found out that three different tables of content were existing for the series, all providing totally different numbers. The first lists 155 prints, the second 162 and a third from a re-printed album in 1865 lists only 55 prints. 16 artists designed the total number of the 162 prints pubilshed by 24 different publishers.

Please send missing informations and new prints to:
horstgraebner@kunisada.de

The prints will be presented according to the order of Andreas Mark’s essay.

Two prints that are not shown in Mark’s illustration are from Sadahide. These prints are other versions of Yuigahama and Enoshima stations.