The Actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I as Hisamatsu

Recorded by the Art Institute of Chicago as a hand-colored woodblock print in habahiro hashira-e format and urushi-e classification dating to around 1748, this image depicts the kabuki actor Sanogawa Ichimatsu I in the role of Hisamatsu, the young apprentice whose tragic love affair with the merchant daughter Osome was the central narrative of one of the most popular kabuki and joruri plays of the eighteenth century. The Osome-Hisamatsu cycle, with its theme of doomed cross-class romance and double suicide, ran for decades on the Edo stage in repeatedly revised versions, and the role of Hisamatsu, traditionally played by a male-role actor with strong onnagata sympathies, gave performers like Ichimatsu the chance to display the soft beauty of the apprentice's youth and the dignity of his romantic suffering. Ishikawa Toyonobu's portrait places Ichimatsu in the wide hashira-e format that allowed him to give the figure full vertical extension while still developing the textile patterns of Hisamatsu's apprentice costume. Urushi-e classification confirms the application of lustrous black lacquer-like accents and hand-applied pigments. The Art Institute sheet is an essential document of mid-Edo Hisamatsu iconography and of Ichimatsu's range as an actor.