The Actor Iwai Hanshiro IV as Yae (?), in the Play Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami (?), Performed at the Kiri Theater (?) in the Seventh Month, 1788 (?)

Sugawara Denju Tenarai Kagami (commonly translated as Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy) is one of the canonical works of jōruri and kabuki, woven around the historical figure of Sugawara no Michizane and a constellation of family tragedies among his retainers. This hosoban print in the Art Institute of Chicago, dated to about 1788, shows Iwai Hanshirō IV in the role of Yae in the play's seventh-month 1788 Kiri Theater production. Yae is one of the three sisters-in-law in the cycle — the wives of the triplet farmers Matsuomaru, Umeomaru, and Sakuramaru — and her role demanded the kind of nuanced emotional registration that onnagata of Hanshirō's caliber were expected to deliver. Shun'ei captures the figure in the school's characteristic restrained pose, the costume rendered with notable color precision, and the face individualized in the recognizable Hanshirō manner. The print may have been the right sheet of a diptych; if so, its companion would have shown another character from the same production, since Sugawara productions habitually called for the pairing or grouping of figures. Either way, the sheet is a fine specimen of the late-1780s Katsukawa actor print at its most refined.