Utagawa Sadahide (1807-1879) Japanese, Framed Woodblock Triptych. Depicts a intricately colored parade of soldiers by the Shogun Yoritomo Minamoto (1147-1199) visiting the Goshirakawa Emperor at Kyoto in 1191. Multiple instances of kanji throughout, in the three-sheet ukiyo-e woodblock print called "hanga."
Overall Size: 36 1/2 x 22 in.
Sight Size: 29 x 13 1/2 in.
#9017 .
Utagawa Sadahide (also known as Gountei Sadahide) was born Hashimoto Kenjirō in 1807 in Fusa Province (modern day Chiba Prefecture) in Shimōsa, Japan. He joined Utagawa school master Kunisada’s studio in the 1820s and became one of the master’s most prominent students. As a member of the school, he took on Utagawa as a surname, and also used the surname Gountei as an art name, eventually returning to his birth surname as an art name very late in his career. Sadahide’s earliest known works are the illustrations for a book called Misaogata Tsuge no Ogushi, and led him to become a popular illustrator throughout his career. In 1828, three years after the death of Utagawa Toyokuni, Kunisada built a stone monument in Myokendo, on which the names of his students were inscribed, and Sadahide was the fourth name on the monument at the age of only 21. However, when Kunisada took over the school and became Toyokuni III after the death of Toyokuni II in 1835, most of his students followed suit and changed their “Sada” kanji to “Kuni,” but Sadahide did not change his art name, having already achieved prominence on his own by then. Kunisada, famous for his temper, jealousy, and intractability, disowned Sadahide, and never spoke to him again before his death in 1865. Most of Sadahide’s early works were bijin-ga portraits of beauties, before broadening his output to landscapes and musha-e warrior prints. In particular, he excelled at painting bird’s eye view of landscapes based on his research by actually walking around the land. In the 1850s Sadahide became known for his prints of exotic locales, showing scenes from the First Opium War in China and for favorably depicting the Ainu people of Ezo, the name for the northernmost part of Japan at the time. After discovering Dutch mapmaking techniques he became obsessed with their detail and precision, and began to produce print maps of Edo, Yokohama, Japan, China, and other parts of the world, one of the first Japanese artists to capture such far away locations. When Japan ended its self-imposed isolation in 1854 he began to make prints of foreigners, their vessels, and the goods they brought to Japan, which made him even more popular with both Japanese consumers and visiting Europeans. His works are some of the earliest Japanese woodblocks depicting foreigners in a positive light, showing activities like dining together or playing badminton. In the 1860s the artist moved to Nagasaki and began to focus on panoramic prints, some of the largest ever created by ukiyo-e artists, and produced books on the history and geography of Japan and nearby lands. He joined ten other artists as part of a delegation the Tokugawa shogunate sent to the International Exposition of 1867 in Paris, where ten of his Edo views were exhibited. Sadahide died in 1879, shortly after completing an experiment in printing a map of Yokohama the size of an indoor tatami (floor) mat. Today he is considered one of the most important and best-selling ukiyo-e artists in history, and his work is held in dozens of museums worldwide including the Harvard Art Museums, the National Museum of Korea, the British Museum, the National Museum of New Zealand, and the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo.
