Utagawa Yoshiharu

Ikuta Ikusaburō, better known as Utagawa Yoshiharu, was a Japanese print designer and book illustrator active during the late Edo and early Meiji periods.
Born in 1828 in Honjo, Edo, he was the third son of Ikuta Minaemon, a hatamoto serving the Tokugawa shogunate as a go-konando-yaku. As a child, he was adopted by his father`s elder brother. In his youth, Yoshiharu developed a strong interest in kabuki and reportedly attempted to become a pupil of the popular actor Nakamura Shikan IV. His adopted father opposed this ambition and confined him to the family home, where he began drawing portraits of actors. He subsequently studied first under Yanagawa Shigenobu II and later under Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
He initially signed his works Ichibaisai Yoshiharu, using the characters 芳晴, but around the Keiō era (1865-1868) adopted the alternative spelling 芳春, which retained the same pronunciation. He also used several other art names, including Ikkitsusai, Ippōsai and Chōkōrō.
Yoshiharu worked in a wide variety of genres, producing bijin-ga, musha-e, kaika-e, omocha-e, actor prints and illustrations for popular books. Among his characteristic Meiji-period works are triptychs depicting Western circus performers and the newly introduced steam railway. These images record the spectacles, technologies and changing urban culture that accompanied Japan`s modernization. In his later years, he also worked in Osaka as an illustrator for the Konohana Shinbun.
After returning to Tokyo, Yoshiharu lived in the Tsukiji district, where he died from illness on February 5, 1888, at the age of sixty-one. Although less celebrated than several other pupils of Kuniyoshi, his varied body of work provides valuable visual evidence of the cultural transition from the final decades of the Tokugawa shogunate to early Meiji Japan.