Kuniyoshi and His Cats: The Ukiyo-e Artist Who Loved Felines
He made his name on warrior prints, but Utagawa Kuniyoshi is loved just as much for his cats. The story of ukiyo-e's great cat artist, and cats in Japanese prints.
The Artist Who Loved Cats
Of all the great ukiyo-e artists, one is the patron saint of cat lovers: Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
Kuniyoshi (1797 to 1861) was one of the biggest names of his era. He made his fame with bold warrior prints, full of tattooed heroes and monsters, and he was hugely prolific, with more than 5,000 designs. But he is just as loved today for something gentler: his cats.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art puts it plainly. Kuniyoshi "was also a cat lover and created a number of works incorporating feline subjects." It shows in the work. He drew cats again and again, with real affection and a lot of humor.
Cats Everywhere in His Work
Kuniyoshi found a hundred ways to put cats in a print.
In 1849 he made a triptych called Cats as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road. The Tōkaidō was the famous highway between Edo and Kyoto, with fifty-three post stations along the way. Kuniyoshi drew a cat for each one, and each cat puns on its station's name. It is a joke you have to "read," and it shows how playful he was.
He also arranged cats into shapes. In one set, cats curl and stretch to form the written characters for the names of fish. In another, cats act out kabuki plays, standing in for famous actors.
And he loved the spooky side of cats. Old Japan had tales of the bakeneko, a cat that grows into a monster. Kuniyoshi drew these cat-demons too, like the ghostly cat of Okabe.
Why Cats?
By tradition, Kuniyoshi lived surrounded by cats. It is often said that he kept many of them in his studio and even worked with a kitten tucked into his robe. Those stories are part of his legend, though they are hard to prove. What is certain is that no other ukiyo-e artist drew cats with quite so much love.
It helped that Edo loved cats too. Cats earned their keep by hunting the mice that threatened grain and silkworms, and they turn up all over Japanese culture, from the lucky beckoning cat, the maneki-neko with its paw raised to call in good fortune, to the cat-monsters of folk tales.
Cats Beyond Kuniyoshi
Kuniyoshi was the great cat artist, but not the only one. Cats appear across ukiyo-e, often curled in the lap of a beautiful woman in a bijin-ga. Utamaro, Kunisada, and others all drew them. The cat print we carry is one of these, by Utagawa Kunisada, a rival and equal of Kuniyoshi.
See for Yourself
The cat print we carry is a reproduction of Kunisada's design. It is a real woodblock print, made by hand in the traditional way, not a machine copy. It measures about 395 by 271mm. It is pre-owned and shows some age, with a few spots and marks, which is normal for a print like this. The product page has photos of the exact condition.
You can also browse our Kuniyoshi prints here. New to prints? Our guide on original, reprint, or reproduction explains the terms.
Sources
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Kuniyoshi's Okazaki cat demon.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Kuniyoshi vs. Kunisada and his cat-monster prints.
British Museum — the beckoning cat (maneki-neko).
John Fiorillo, Viewing Japanese Prints — on Kuniyoshi.