Actor Segawa Kikunojô III Possibly as Ono no Komachi in “Komachi Village: New Year at the Theater” (“Komachimura shibai no shôgatsu”)

This hosoban diptych in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to about 1789, shows Segawa Kikunojō III in a possible identification as Ono no Komachi in the production Komachimura Shibai no Shōgatsu (New Year at the Theater in Komachi Village). Segawa Kikunojō III was the most celebrated onnagata of his generation, a performer whose face and stage manner Shun'ei rendered repeatedly across the 1780s and 1790s. Ono no Komachi, the legendary ninth-century poet and beauty, was a perennial subject for kabuki adaptation, often serving as a vehicle for displays of onnagata refinement. The diptych format permitted Shun'ei to compose a larger scene than a single hosoban would allow, and the print is a notable example of the school's interest in poetic and historical female figures alongside their more conventional contemporary subjects. Kikunojō's distinctive features — the slightly downturned eyes, the carefully arranged hairline — are rendered with the kind of recognizable specificity that the Katsukawa school had pioneered.