sketches

Day two hundred and thirty-seven: When this week began, if you had asked me what new thing I would learn about prints, I would not have mentioned the Japanese printmaker Utagawa Kunisada (aka Toyokuni III). That, however, is one of the wonderful parts of my job: every day some unexpected piece of paper requires a bit of my attention, and I learn something new. Kunisada’s color woodcut portraits of actors were wildly popular in Japan during the mid-nineteenth century, with some editions reaching 7000 impressions! My sketch today is based on a detail from one particular woodcut that my colleague Brooks and I found ourselves researching this week. The 1852 original depicts the actor Ichikawa Danjuro VIII in a series titled “Seven flourishing actors on paper lanterns in the evening cool.”