About the artist
A member of the Utagawa school, Kunihiro worked for many years in Osaka, steadily presenting quality designs throughout his active period. His yakusha-e (actor prints) tend towards representation of the popular actors Nakamura Utaemon III and Arashi Kichisaburo II. During the mid-1820s Kunihiro took Shigeharu as a pupil. The two continued to collaborate even as Shigeharu became a prolific and popular artist in his own right.
Though he initially worked with variety of publishers including Wataki (1816), Honsei (1816), and Hirooka (1817), Kunihiro found a career-long connection with Tenki. A novel of the time describes Kunihiro as “Tenmaya Kunihiro,” as if suggesting that Kunihiro himself was a proprietor at the publishing house. The artist worked with Tenki exclusively until 1823, after which point he occasionally produced compositions for Honsei as well.