The Actor Ichikawa Komazo II as Kudo Saemon Suketsune (?) in the Play Haru wa Soga Akebono-zoshi (?), Performed at the Nakamura Theater (?) in the First Month, 1772 (?)

Ippitsusai Buncho's hosoban print, in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, tentatively depicts the Edo kabuki actor Ichikawa Komazo II as Kudo Saemon Suketsune in a New Year production of Haru wa Soga Akebono-zoshi, performed at the Nakamura Theater in the first month of 1772. Kudo Suketsune is the principal antagonist of the Soga revenge cycle, the cluster of plays based on the long-running story of the brothers Soga Juro and Soga Goro avenging their father's death. New Year productions of Soga material were a fixture of the Edo kabuki calendar, and Edo audiences expected to see the figure of Kudo in his court robes as a recurring visual emblem. Buncho's design uses the tall hosoban format to set Komazo II in the elaborate, patterned costume associated with the role, with the inscribed identifications recording the actor and the production. Buncho was a leading Edo ukiyo-e designer in this short interval of the late 1760s and early 1770s, and his yakusha-e or kabuki actor prints record the casting and visual conventions of major Edo theaters across the year. The question marks in the museum's title indicate residual uncertainty about the identification of role, play, theater, and date, but the work remains a representative example of Buncho's mature portraiture of named performers in Edo kabuki.