Nakamura Utaemon V

Among Iacovleff's most important Japanese drawings, this sanguine and charcoal portrait on paper depicts the great onnagata Nakamura Utaemon V (1865-1940) in the female role he made famous on the Tokyo kabuki stage. Utaemon V — born Nakamura Tamatarō, fifth holder of the prestigious Nakamura Utaemon line — was the foremost specialist of feminine roles of his generation and a towering presence in late Meiji and Taishō kabuki, whose technical mastery of dance and of the elaborate musume (young woman) and keisei (high-ranking courtesan) repertories made him the natural sitter for any visiting Western artist seeking the canonical image of the Japanese theatre. Iacovleff produced the drawing during his 1917-1919 Far Eastern mission, working directly from life backstage at the Imperial Theatre (Teikoku Gekijō) or Kabuki-za, where Utaemon V was then in his full maturity. The artist registers with great precision the actor's bridal coiffure with bridal head-covering (tsunokakushi), the painted eyebrows, the rouged mouth and the immobile, deliberately mask-like composure that the onnagata maintained on stage. The handling is the elegant sanguine drawing that Iacovleff had absorbed from Dmitri Kardovsky at the Imperial Academy in St Petersburg, but the iconographic vocabulary — the close cropping, the concentrated frontal pose, the precise notation of make-up and costume — owes a direct debt to the Japanese [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e) (actor print) tradition. The drawing has appeared on the international Russian-art auction market and remains one of the most reproduced of Iacovleff's Japanese portraits, valued both as a document of the great onnagata of the period and as the most accomplished example of Iacovleff's hybrid Russian-Japanese drawing style.