Actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu II as a Fashionable Young Man (Wakashu)

Ippitsusai Buncho's yakusha-e portrait of Sanogawa Ichimatsu II in the role of a fashionable young man (wakashu) belongs to the central decade of his career as an Edo ukiyo-e designer. The wakashu was a recognizable kabuki and pleasure-quarter type — an elegantly dressed adolescent male, often deployed in plays as a romantic or comic figure, distinguished on the kabuki stage by a partially shaved forehead, long forelocks, and a wardrobe that drew freely on contemporary urban fashion. Buncho presents Ichimatsu II as a standing figure carefully turned at the waist so that the patterning of the outer robe shows to full effect, the obi visible at the rear, and one foot lightly advanced beneath the hem. The hands are kept close to the body, a small gesture that lets the costume's textile design do most of the compositional work. Sanogawa Ichimatsu II carried a name made famous by his predecessor, who had given his name to the still-popular ichimatsu checkered pattern, and Buncho's print plays on that lineage by treating clothing pattern as the carrier of identity. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the impression to about 1764, during the years in which Buncho was establishing the densely captioned, single-actor format that would shape the work he produced with Katsukawa Shunshō later in the decade. The result is a sheet that reads at once as a record of a specific stage appearance and as a study of an idealized urban type circulating through Edo's print market.