The Shop of Sanogawa Ichimatsu

This Art Institute of Chicago benizuri-e oban yoko-e of around 1743 belongs to one of the great themes of Ishikawa Toyonobu's mature career: the kabuki star Sanogawa Ichimatsu I, the onnagata whose checkered kimono pattern became so popular in mid-eighteenth-century Edo that the word ichimatsu came to denote any checkerboard motif in Japanese. The Shop of Sanogawa Ichimatsu translates the actor's celebrity into a genre tableau of an Edo commercial space, and the oban yoko-e horizontal format gives Toyonobu the elongated rectangle in which to stage shop life as theatrical performance. Benizuri-e categorization records that the sheet is a true color woodblock print rather than a hand-colored sheet, with two or three blocks supplying rose pink and grass green over the black-line printing. The horizontal oban was a relatively new format in the 1740s, and Toyonobu was among the designers who explored its narrative possibilities, using the long lateral field to set up exchanges between figures that the standard vertical sheet could not accommodate. The print belongs to the early benizuri-e era and is a key Art Institute document of both Toyonobu's role in popularizing color woodblock printing and Sanogawa Ichimatsu's celebrity-driven commercial influence on Edo culture.