The Actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I as a young man holding an umbrella and a lantern

Catalogued by the Art Institute of Chicago as a hand-colored woodblock print in toku-oban format and beni-e classification dated to around 1748, this image returns to one of Ishikawa Toyonobu's most beloved subjects: the kabuki actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I, here portrayed as a young man, a wakashu, carrying both an umbrella and a paper lantern. The pairing of accessories places the figure in an implied nocturnal scene, with the lantern supplying light and the umbrella indicating weather; both props extend the figure's vertical line and supply graphic geometry to the composition. Ichimatsu, the great onnagata whose checkered kimono pattern gave Japanese the word for the checkerboard motif, was the most repeatedly portrayed actor in Toyonobu's oeuvre, and this sheet sits among the canonical depictions of his career. Toku-oban indicates the larger oban format reserved for prestigious sheets, while beni-e classification identifies the use of hand-applied safflower-derived pink pigment over the printed black line, supplying the warm rose register of cheek and lip and the highlights of the lantern's paper. The Art Institute print is an essential document of mid-Edo kabuki celebrity culture and of Toyonobu's most sustained subject across the 1740s.