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Shini-e
, also called "death pictures" or "death portraits", are Japanese woodblock prints, particularly those done in the ukiyo-e style popular through the Edo period (1603–1867) and into the beginnings of the 20th century. When a kabuki actor died, memorial portraits were conventionally published with his farewell poem and posthumous name.Keyes, Roger ''et al.'' (1973). ''The Theatrical World of Osaka Prints,'' p. 320; Chin, Connie and Melinda Takeuchi "Actors' Death Prints: Discovery of a New Genre." ''Horizons'' (Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University) Fall 2005, p. 7. Memorial portraits were created by ukiyo-e artists to honor a colleague or former teacher who had died. Gallery Memorial Portrait of Hiroshige, by Kunisada.jpg, Hiroshige by Kunisada, 1858 Kunisada shini e.jpg, Kunisada by Toyohara Kunichika, 1864 Yōshū Chikanobu Iwai Hanshiro VIII.jpg, Iwai Hanshirō VIII, by Toyohara Chikanobu 1882 See also * List of ukiyo-e terms This is a list of terms freq ...
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Toyohara Chikanobu
, better known to his contemporaries as , was a Japanese painter and printmaker who was widely regarded as a prolific woodblock artist during the Meiji epoch. Names Chikanobu signed his artwork . This was his . The artist's was ; and it was published in his obituary.See "Yōshū Chikanobu bituary" ''Miyako Shimbun,'' No. 8847 (October 2, 1912). p. 195: "Yōshū Chikanobu, who represented in ''nishiki-e'' the Great Interior of the Chiyoda Castle and was famous as a master of ''bijin-ga,'' had retired to Shimo-Ōsaki at the foot of Goten-yama five years ago and led an elegant life away from the world, but suffered from stomach cancer starting this past June, and finally died on the night of September 28th at the age of seventy-five. His real name being Hashimoto Naoyoshi, he was a retainer of the Sakakibara clan of Takada domain in Echigo province. After the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate, he joined the Shōgitai and fought in the Battle of Ueno. After the defeat at U ...
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Kunisada Memorial
Utagawa Kunisada ( ja, 歌川 国貞; 1786 – 12 January 1865), also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III (, ), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist. He is considered the most popular, prolific and commercially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi. Evaluation of Kunisada in art history At the end of the Edo period (1603–1867), Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada were the three best representatives of the Japanese color woodcut in Edo (capital city of Japan, now Tokyo). However, among European and American collectors of Japanese prints, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century, all three of these artists were actually regarded as rather inferior to the greats of classical ukiyo-e, and therefore as having contributed considerably to the downfall of their art. For this reason, some referred to their works as "decadent". Beginning in the 1930 ...
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Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north toward the East China Sea, Philippine Sea, and Taiwan in the south. Japan is a part of the Ring of Fire, and spans Japanese archipelago, an archipelago of List of islands of Japan, 6852 islands covering ; the five main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu (the "mainland"), Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa Island, Okinawa. Tokyo is the Capital of Japan, nation's capital and largest city, followed by Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Japan is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the List of countries and dependencies by population density, most densely populated and Urbanization by country, urbanized. About three-fourths of Geography of Japan, the c ...
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Woodblock Printing
Woodblock printing or block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Each page or image is created by carving a wooden block to leave only some areas and lines at the original level; it is these that are inked and show in the print, in a relief printing process. Carving the blocks is skilled and laborious work, but a large number of impressions can then be printed. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220 AD. Woodblock printing existed in Tang China by the 7th century AD and remained the most common East Asian method of printing books and other texts, as well as images, until the 19th century. ''Ukiyo-e'' is the best-known type of Japanese woodblock art print. Most European uses of the technique for printing images on paper are covered by the art term woodcut, except for the bl ...
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Melinda Takeuchi
Melinda Takeuchi is an academic, an author, a Japanologist and a Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Department of Art History at Stanford University. Early life Takeuchi grew up in what was then rural-Malibu in Southern California. In 1966, she earned a B.A. in Asian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She continued her studies at UCSB, earning a M.A. with Honors in the History of Art in 1972. In Japan in 1975–1976, she was a Research Fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo. Takeuchi was awarded her Ph.D. in the History of Art in 1979 at the University of Michigan. Career Takeuchi invested thirty years climbing the tenure-track ladder at Stanford. In recent years, Takeuchi's life in academia has been balanced by the activities associated with breeding Friesian horses on a small ranch in Northern California. Selected works In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Melinda Takeuchi, OCLC/WorldCat ...
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Ukiyo-e
Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ... of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; Flora of Japan, flora and Wildlife of Japan#Fauna, fauna; and Shunga, erotica. The term translates as "picture[s] of the floating world". In 1603, the city of Edo (Tokyo) became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate. The ''chōnin'' class (merchants, craftsmen and workers), positioned at the bottom of Four occupations, the social order, benefited the most from the city's rapid economic growth, and began to indulge in and patronise the entertainment o ...
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Edo Period
The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characterized by economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policies, a stable population, perpetual peace, and popular enjoyment of arts and culture. The period derives its name from Edo (now Tokyo), where on March 24, 1603, the shogunate was officially established by Tokugawa Ieyasu. The period came to an end with the Meiji Restoration and the Boshin War, which restored imperial rule to Japan. Consolidation of the shogunate The Edo period or Tokugawa period is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's regional '' daimyo''. A revolution took place from the time of the Kamakura shogunate, which existed with the Tennō's court, to the Tok ...
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Kabuki
is a classical form of Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily-stylised performances, the often-glamorous costumes worn by performers, and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers. Kabuki is thought to have originated in the very early Edo period, when founder Izumo no Okuni formed a female dance troupe who performed dances and light sketches in Kyoto. The art form later developed into its present all-male theatrical form after women were banned from performing in kabuki theatre in 1629. Kabuki developed throughout the late 17th century and reached its zenith in the mid-18th century. In 2005, kabuki theatre was proclaimed by UNESCO as an intangible heritage possessing outstanding universal value. In 2008, it was inscribed in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists, UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Etymology The individual kanji that make up the word ''kabuki'' can be read as , , and . ...
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Hiroshige
Utagawa Hiroshige (, also ; ja, 歌川 広重 ), born Andō Tokutarō (; 1797 – 12 October 1858), was a Japanese ''ukiyo-e'' artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series ''The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō'' and for his vertical-format landscape series ''One Hundred Famous Views of Edo''. The subjects of his work were atypical of the ''ukiyo-e'' genre, whose typical focus was on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan's Edo period (1603–1868). The popular series '' Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji'' by Hokusai was a strong influence on Hiroshige's choice of subject, though Hiroshige's approach was more poetic and ambient than Hokusai's bolder, more formal prints. Subtle use of color was essential in Hiroshige's prints, often printed with multiple impressions in the same area and with extensive use of '' bokashi'' (color gradation), ...
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Kunisada
Utagawa Kunisada ( ja, 歌川 国貞; 1786 – 12 January 1865), also known as Utagawa Toyokuni III (, ), was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist. He is considered the most popular, prolific and commercially successful designer of ukiyo-e woodblock printing in Japan, woodblock prints in 19th-century Japan. In his own time, his reputation far exceeded that of his contemporaries, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Kuniyoshi. Evaluation of Kunisada in art history At the end of the Edo period (1603–1867), Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi and Kunisada were the three best representatives of the Japanese color woodcut in Edo (capital city of Japan, now Tokyo). However, among European and American collectors of Japanese prints, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century, all three of these artists were actually regarded as rather inferior to the greats of classical ukiyo-e, and therefore as having contributed considerably to the downfall of their art. For this reason, some referred to t ...
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Toyohara Kunichika
Toyohara Kunichika ( ja, 豊原 国周; 30 June 1835 – 1 July 1900) was a ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock print artist. Talented as a child, at about thirteen he became a student of Tokyo's then-leading print maker, Utagawa Kunisada. His deep appreciation and knowledge of kabuki drama led to his production primarily of yakusha-e, which are woodblock prints of kabuki actors and scenes from popular plays of the time. An alcoholic and womanizer, Kunichika also portrayed women deemed beautiful (''bijinga''), contemporary social life, and a few landscapes and historical scenes. He worked successfully in the Edo period, and carried those traditions into the Meiji period. To his contemporaries and now to some modern art historians, this has been seen as a significant achievement during a transitional period of great social and political change in Japan's history. Early life and education The artist who became known as Toyohara Kunichika was born Ōshima Yasohachi on June 3 ...
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Iwai Hanshirō VIII
was a Japanese kabuki performer, known both for his own work and for his place in the lineage of a family of kabuki actors.Nussbaum, Louis Frédéric ''et al.'' (2005). He was the son of Iwai Hanshirō VII.Leiter, Samuel L. (2006). Iwai Hanshirō was a stage name with significant cultural and historical connotations. In the conservative Kabuki world, stage names are passed from father to son in formal system which converts the kabuki stage name into a mark of accomplishment. This actor assumed the mantle of his father's stage name in 1872. ; Lineage of Iwai stage names * Iwai Hanshirō I (1652–1699)Leiter, * Iwai Hanshirō II (d. 1710) * Iwai Hanshirō III (1698–1760) * Iwai Hanshirō IV (1747–1800) * Iwai Hanshirō V (1776–1847) * Iwai Hanshirō VI (1799–1836) * Iwai Hanshirō VII (1804–1845) * Iwai Hanshirō VIII (1829–1882) * Iwai Hanshirō IX (1882–1945) * Iwai Hanshirō X (1927-2011)Scott, See also * Shūmei Notes References * Leiter, Samuel ...
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