1836
paint
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers is a 1836 paint by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This sketch shows a samurai kneeling in a snowstorm, holding a letter. His dark robe stands out against white drifts. It’s a rare surviving copy of Kuniyoshi’s early work. Usually these sketches were cut up to carve the printing block. Here, the lines are crisp and full of energy. Look for other Kuniyoshi prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
This drawing by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from 1836 shows a scene from the sixth act of the Kabuki play *The Treasury of the Forty-seven Loyal Retainers*, set in an interior space overlooking a garden with five figures present. The work is a preparatory sketch for a woodblock print, a stage in the process typically discarded once the key-block is created. The scene is part of a proposed series depicting different acts of the play, though no other works from this series are known to exist.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Kuniyoshi grew up in old Tokyo when the city was still called Edo. His dad ran a silk shop, but Kuniyoshi loved anything with pictures—scrolls, screens, comic books. He talked his way into the Utagawa school, a kind of…
See the richer artist page
