The Actor Iwai Kiyotaro II as Lady Itohagi (?) in the Play Genji Saiko Kogane Tachibana (?), Performed at the Ichimura Theater (?) in the Eleventh Month, 1788 (?)

The left sheet of a hosoban diptych in the Art Institute of Chicago, this print shows Iwai Kiyotarō II as Lady Itohagi in the eleventh-month 1788 Ichimura Theater production of Genji Saikō Kogane Tachibana. Iwai Kiyotarō II, like his clan-name colleague Hanshirō IV, was an onnagata, and Lady Itohagi is one of those classically tragic female roles characteristic of the era's productions on Genji-related themes. Shun'ei's hosoban-format treatment is intimate and concentrated: the figure inhabits the narrow sheet with poise, her elaborate hair arrangement and patterned kimono delineated with the kind of precise color registration that Edo printers had perfected by the late 1780s. The print's identification as the left sheet of a diptych points to a now-fragmented composition; its surviving companion would have completed the staged tableau, since Katsukawa-school designs frequently used multi-sheet formats to capture confrontations or paired scenes from a play. Even as a single surviving sheet, however, the print documents both the specific production and Shun'ei's mature mastery of the school's female-figure conventions.