Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) / Toyokuni III (三代豊国) (artist 1786 – 01/12/1865)
View of Fujieda (Fujieda no zu: 藤枝ノ図) from the chuban series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi: 東海道五十三次之内)
ca 1838
Signed: Kōchōrō Kunisada ga (香蝶楼国貞画)
No publisher's seal
No censor's seal
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Diet Library
Spencer Museum of Art
Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
British Museum - Hiroshige's 'Fujieda jimba tsugitate'
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art - they date their copy to 1836
Bryn Mawr
Honolulu Museum of Art
National Gallery, Prague Fujieda is about 4 miles from Okabe. In Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection, Honolulu Academy of Arts on page 186 it says: "Travelers on government duty, by presenting their official certificate with its red seal (shuinjō), paid no fee for using a man and horse, while commoners paid a fixed fee for these services. A more comfortable but more expensive way to travel overland was in a palanquin. The system may have been cumbersome at times, but it worked in an orderly fashion to facilitate the flow of people and cargo.
At the top center of this print [that is the Hiroshige], beyond the line of travelers and laborers, are two palanquins and a horse, ready for hire." Kunisada kept this last element, but rearranged the placement of the for-hire palanquins.
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This is number 23 in the series. The curatorial files at the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna say: "Kunisada shows the same scene as Hiroshige, but makes small changes to, for example, the position, posture and appearance of the individual persons."
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The setting is a relay station or toiyaba (問屋場 - a brokerage).
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Illustrated in a small color reproduction in Kunisada's Tokaido: Riddles in Japanese Woodblock Prints by Andreas Marks, Hotei Publishing, 2013, page 68, T24-23.
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (author)