Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Turtle Fun: Wonderful, Wonderful (Kiki myōmyō)
Utagawa Kuniyoshi Japanese
Not on view
Working at the end of the Edo period, the ingenious and prolific print artist Kuniyoshi brings the story of actors’ likenesses to a comic culmination in his depiction of twenty-three turtles, each with the face of a famous Kabuki actor of the day, scurrying around a red lacquer sake cup. Newly enforced publishing censorship rules from the Tenpō Reforms (1841–43) prohibited printmakers from making identifiable pictures of actors or courtesans.
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