Benten Kozō Kikunosuke

This sepia drawing on paper, dated 1929 and approximately 73 by 56 cm, depicts the chivalrous-robber hero Benten Kozō Kikunosuke from the Kawatake Mokuami play Aoto Zōshi Hana no [Nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) (青砥稿花紅彩画, 1862), the celebrated drama known to kabuki audiences as the Shiranami Gonin-otoko (Five White-Wave Robbers) play. Benten Kozō is the most famous of the five gallant thieves, a young man of striking beauty who first appears on stage disguised as a samurai daughter shopping at a Kamakura cloth merchant's, then reveals his true identity in the great act of name-revelation (na-nori) accompanied by the play's celebrated robe-shedding sequence. Iacovleff drew the portrait a decade after his Far Eastern mission, working from his earlier studies and from the visual memory of the Tokyo stage; the date suggests the work was produced for a Paris exhibition of his Japanese cycle, perhaps at the gallery of Charles-Auguste Girard or in the context of his preparation for the 1928 Moscow retrospective. The figure is shown in the stage costume of the role — the bandanna headcloth, the kimono with arabesque crests, the partial display of the back tattoo of cherry blossoms that is the character's hallmark — and is rendered in Iacovleff's characteristic combination of precise linear contour and soft chiaroscuro modelling. The drawing is a key document of the European reception of Mokuami's late-Edo robber plays and one of the finest non-Japanese depictions of the standard kabuki repertory of the period.