Utagawa School and Inherited Art-names
It was a Japanese custom for successful apprentices to take the names of their masters. In the main Utagawa school, there was a hierarchy of gō (art-names), from the most senior to junior. As each senior person died, the others would move up a step.
The head of the school generally used the gō (and signed his prints) as Toyokuni. When Kunisada I proclaimed himself head of the school (c. 1842), he started signing as Toyokuni, and the next most senior member, Kochoro (a name also previously used by Kunisada I, but not as his chief gō), started signing as Kunisada (Kunisada II, in this case).
The next most senior member after him, in turn, began signing as Kunimasa (Kunimasa IV, in this case), which had been Kochoro's gō before he became Kunisada II. (The original Kunimasa I had been a student of Toyokuni I.)
Following is a list of some members of the main Utagawa school, giving the succession of names, along with the modern numbering of each:
- Toyokuni (I)
- Toyoshige -> Toyokuni (II)
- Kunisada (I) -> Toyokuni (III)
- Kochoro -> Kunimasa (III) -> Kunisada (II) -> Toyokuni (IV)
- Kochoro (II) -> Kunimasa (IV) -> Kunisada (III) -> Toyokuni (V)
See here for a more extensive list.
Read more about this topic: Utagawa School
Famous quotes containing the words school and/or inherited:
“For millions of men and women, the church has been the hospital for the soul, the school for the mind and the safe depository for moral ideas.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Poor John Field!—I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it,—thinking to live by some derivative old-country mode in this primitive new country.... With his horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam’s grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)