資料名 |
Fifty-three Stations of the Toukaidou Highway Okazaki |
解説 |
Utagawa Yoshikazu The production date: 1853 (Kaei 6) Like those at Goyu and Yoshida stations, the inns at Akasaka Station employed many serving women. Akasaka was such a lively town that some said there would be no point in traveling to and from Edo without Goyu, Akasaka, and Yoshida. In the print for Okazaki Station, Okazaki Castle, where Tokugawa Ieyasu was born, lies in the background, and Yahagi Bridge, which spanned the Yahagi River, in the foreground. The boy in the center is likened to Watonai, the protagonist of Kokusenya Kassen, a puppet-theater play. That story has a scene in which Watonai vanquishes a tiger with an amulet from the Ise Grand Shrine. In this print, however, the boy is raising a wooden amulet against a mere cat. Many Utagawa school ukiyo-e artists published the series “Fifty-three Stations of the Toukaidou Highway”. In this distinctive series, Yoshikazu introduced the legends and episodes that related to the post stations of the Toukaidou Highway humorously. Generally, he produced humorous pictures with horizontal small ko-ban size format. Utagawa Yoshikazu Date of birth and death unknown Yoshikazu was a pupil of Utagawa Kuniyoshi and active from the Kaei era till Meiji 3 (1848~1870). He also used the artist names such as Shunsai and Ichikawa. He produced many worrier pictures, kacho-ga (pictures of birds and flowers), and Yokohama-e (ukiyo-e depicting foreigner’s life styles or the scenes of Yokohama). He also produced illustrations of kusa-zoshi (books with illustrations ). |
資料番号 |
10619 |
