BUNRAKU doll (variant 2)

BUNRAKU doll is an undated Taishō or early Shōwa print by Hasegawa Sadanobu III (長谷川貞信三代, 1881-1963), documented through ukiyo-e.org (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/wbp/795380641). As the third head of the Hasegawa lineage of Osaka-Kyoto ukiyo-e printmakers, Sadanobu III inherited a workshop tradition founded by his grandfather Hasegawa Sadanobu I, who had brought Utagawa-school yakusha-e idioms from Edo into the Kamigata commercial print trade in the mid-nineteenth century. By Sadanobu III's working lifetime that tradition was no longer the dominant theatrical medium it had once been, but it remained alive in Osaka and Kyoto as a connoisseur idiom — sustained by audiences who collected sheets devoted to bunraku, kabuki, and Kyoto geisha culture. The present subject, a bunraku puppet rather than a living actor, is a characteristically Kansai choice: bunraku is the puppet theatre of Osaka, codified at the Takemoto-za in the early eighteenth century and still performed in Sadanobu III's day at successor theatres. Designs showing single puppets, isolated against a plain ground in the manner of a yakusha-e ōkubi-e, are a Hasegawa workshop specialty, treating the carved-wooden doll with the same gravity that earlier ukiyo-e accorded a star kabuki performer. The ukiyo-e.org record preserves the impression as a Sadanobu III print without museum-level cataloguing, but the design vocabulary — careful articulation of the puppet's wig, costume, and painted features against neutral ground — situates the sheet within the Kansai late-ukiyo-e revival of the 1910s through 1930s, when the Hasegawa house produced theatrical and Kyoto-genre prints aimed simultaneously at local connoisseurs and the emerging Western collector market.